« January 2005 | Main | March 2005 »
February 27, 2005
NY Times Expose- Private Health Care in Jails Can Be A Death Sentence
Sunday, February 27, 2005, Page 1 and three full additional pages.
Two additional articles will follow.
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/27/nyregion/27jail.html?ex=1110171600&en=f4407c047b8271e8&ei=5070
If you go to the link, the article also has maps, graphs, etc.
Brian Tetrault was 44 when he was led into a dim county jail cell in upstate New York in 2001, charged with taking some skis and other items from his ex-wife's home. A former nuclear scientist who had struggled with Parkinson's disease, he began to die almost immediately, and state investigators would later discover why: The jail's medical director had cut off all but a few of the 32 pills he needed each day to quell his tremors.
Over the next 10 days, Mr. Tetrault slid into a stupor, soaked in his own sweat and urine. But he never saw the jail doctor again, and the nurses dismissed him as a faker. After his heart finally stopped, investigators said, correction officers at the Schenectady jail doctored records to make it appear he had been released before he died.
Two months later, Victoria Williams Smith, the mother of a teenage boy, was booked into another upstate jail, in Dutchess County, charged with smuggling drugs to her husband in prison. She, too, had only 10 days to live after she began complaining of chest pains. She phoned friends in desperation: The medical director would not prescribe anything more potent than Bengay or the arthritis medicine she had brought with her, investigators said. A nurse scorned her pleas to be hospitalized as a ploy to get drugs. When at last an ambulance was called, Ms. Smith was on the floor of her cell, shaking from a heart attack that would kill her within the hour. She was 35.
In these two harrowing deaths, state investigators concluded, the culprit was a for-profit corporation, Prison Health Services, that had moved aggressively into New York State in the last decade, winning jail contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars with an enticing sales pitch: Take the messy and expensive job of providing medical care from overmatched government officials, and give it to an experienced nationwide outfit that could recruit doctors, battle lawsuits and keep costs down.
A yearlong examination of Prison Health by The New York Times reveals repeated instances of medical care that has been flawed and sometimes lethal. The company's performance around the nation has provoked criticism from judges and sheriffs, lawsuits from inmates' families and whistle-blowers, and condemnations by federal, state and local authorities. The company has paid millions of dollars in fines and settlements.
In the two deaths, and eight others across upstate New York, state investigators say they kept discovering the same failings: medical staffs trimmed to the bone, doctors underqualified or out of reach, nurses doing tasks beyond their training, prescription drugs withheld, patient records unread and employee misconduct unpunished.
Not surprisingly, Prison Health, which is based outside Nashville, is no longer working in most of those upstate jails. But it is hardly out of work. Despite a tarnished record, Prison Health has sold its promise of lower costs and better care, and become the biggest for-profit company providing medical care in jails and prisons. It has amassed 86 contracts in 28 states, and now cares for 237,000 inmates, or about one in every 10 people behind bars.
Prison Health Services says that any lapses that have occurred are far outnumbered by its successes, and that many cities and states have been pleased with its work. Company executives dispute the state's findings in the upstate deaths, saying their policy is never to deny necessary medical care.
And they say that many complaints - from litigious inmates, disgruntled employees and overzealous investigators - simply come with the hugely challenging work they have taken on.
"What we do," said Michael Catalano, the company chairman, "is provide a public health service that many others are unable or unwilling to do."
The examination of Prison Health also reveals a company that is very much a creature of a growing phenomenon: the privatization of jail and prison health care. As governments try to shed the burden of soaring medical costs - driven by the exploding problems of AIDS and mental illness among inmates - this field has become a $2 billion-a-year industry.
It is an intensely competitive world populated by a handful of companies, each striving to find enough doctors and nurses for a demanding and sometimes dangerous job. The companies, overseen by local governments with limited choices and money, regularly move from jail to jail, and scandal to scandal - often disliked but always needed.
Perhaps the most striking example of Prison Health's ability to prosper amid its set of troubles unfolded in New York State. Despite disappointed customers and official investigations in Florida and Pennsylvania, the company still managed to win its largest contract ever in 2000, when New York City agreed to pay it $254 million over three years to provide care at the correctional labyrinth on Rikers Island.
The city, in fact, just renewed that deal in January for another three years - despite the deaths upstate, and a chorus of criticism over Prison Health's work at Rikers, where employees and government monitors have complained of staff shortages and delays in drugs and treatments for H.I.V. and mental illnesses. A rash of suicides in 2003 prompted a scramble by officials to fill serious gaps in care and oversight.
Along the way, though, Prison Health has acquired at least one tenacious adversary. The State Commission of Correction, appointed by the governor to investigate every death in jail, has moved over the last several years from polite recommendations to bitter denunciations, frustrated by what it says is the company's refusal to admit and address deadly mistakes.
The commission has faulted company policies, or mistakes and misconduct by its employees, in 23 deaths of inmates in the city and six upstate counties. Fifteen times in the last four years, it has recommended that the state discipline Prison Health doctors and nurses.
And since 2001, the commission, along with the State Education Department, which regulates the practice of medicine, has urged Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to halt the company's operations in New York, saying that Prison Health lacks any legal authority to practice medicine because business executives are in charge. New York, like many other states, requires that for-profit corporations providing medical services be owned and controlled by doctors, to keep business calculations from driving medical decisions.
Prison Health says its work in New York is legal because it has set up two corporations headed by doctors to run medical care. But state investigators have called those corporations shams.
Elsewhere, Prison Health did not go that far, until questioned by The Times. Now it says it is creating doctor-run corporations in 11 other states with similar laws, including New Jersey and California.
"Had we realized this would be a question, we would have addressed it earlier," said Mr. Catalano, the company's chairman. "We have nothing to hide here."
But in one report after another, the state commission has exposed what it says is the dangerous way Prison Health has operated.
One investigation found that the doctor overseeing care in several upstate jails in 2001 - continually overruling the doctors there, and refusing drugs and treatments - was not even licensed to practice in New York State. He did the job, the commission found, by telephone - from Washington.
The commission's gravest findings have involved deaths on the company's watch, mostly of people who had not been convicted of anything.
Candy Brown, a 46-year-old Rochester woman jailed in 2000 on a parole violation, died when her withdrawal from heroin went untreated for two days as she lay in her own vomit and excrement in the Monroe County Jail, moaning and crying for help. But nurses did not call a doctor or even clean her off, investigators said. Her fellow inmates took pity and washed her face; some guards took it on themselves to ease her into a shower and a final change of clothes.
Scott Mayo Jr. was only a few minutes old in 2001 when guards fished him out of a toilet in the maternity unit of Albany County Jail. It was the guards, investigators said, who found a faint pulse in the premature baby and worked fiercely to keep his heart beating as a nurse stood by, offering little help.
"We're a jail," the nurse told state officials after the infant died. "There's no equipment for a fetus. Or a newborn."
In at least one death report, the commission took the opportunity to voice a broad indictment of the company. Frederick C. Lamy, chairman of the commission's medical review board, denounced Prison Health, or P.H.S. as it widely known, as "reckless and unprincipled in its corporate pursuits, irrespective of patient care."
"The lack of credentials, lack of training, shocking incompetence and outright misconduct" of the doctors and nurses in the case was "emblematic of P.H.S. Inc.'s conduct as a business corporation, holding itself out as a medical care provider while seemingly bereft of any quality control."
In its review of Prison Health's work, The Times interviewed government regulators, law enforcement officials and legal and medical specialists, including current and former company employees. The review included thousands of pages of public and internal company documents, state and city records, and every New York State report on deaths under the company's care.
The examination shows that in many parts of the country, including counties in New Jersey and Florida, Prison Health has become a mainstay, satisfying officials by paring expenses and marshaling medical staffs without the rules and union issues that constrain government efforts.
But elsewhere, it has hopscotched from place to place, largely unscathed by accusations that in cutting costs, it has cut corners.
Georgia, which hired Prison Health in 1995, replaced the company two years later, complaining that it had understaffed prison clinics. Similar complaints led Maine to end its contract in 2003. In Alabama, one prison has only two doctors for more than 2,200 prisoners; one AIDS specialist, before she left this month, called staffing "skeletal" and said she sometimes lacked even soap to wash her hands between treating patients.
In Philadelphia's jails, state and federal court monitors in the late 1990's told of potentially dangerous delays and gaps in treatment and medication for inmates under Prison Health, which nonetheless went on in 2000 to win a contract not far away in the Baltimore City Detention Center. There, two years later, the federal Department of Justice reported that better care might have prevented four inmate deaths. One guard, it said, complained that she had to fight nurses to get sick inmates examined.
Such stories can be heard around the country. In Las Vegas, after an H.I.V.-positive inmate died in 2002, nurses and public defenders said the county jail's medical director had refused medications for AIDS and mental illness, calling inmates junkies.
In Indiana, Barbara Logan, a former Prison Health administrator who filed a whistleblower suit last year, said in an interview that the pharmacy at her state prison was so poorly stocked that nurses often had to run out to CVS to refill routine prescriptions for diabetes and high blood pressure.
Before Prison Health even started in Georgia, there had been several inmate deaths in neighboring Florida that cost the company three county contracts, millions of dollars in settlements - and an apology for its part in the 1994 death of 46-year-old Diane Nelson. Jailed in Pinellas County on charges that she had slapped her teenage daughter, Ms. Nelson suffered a heart attack after nurses failed for two days to order the heart medication her private doctor had prescribed. As she collapsed, a nurse told her, "Stop the theatrics."
The same nurse, in a deposition, also admitted that she had joked to the jail staff, "We save money because we skip the ambulance and bring them right to the morgue."
A Tough Business: Taking On Headaches, and Creating Some, Too
Few jobs are harder to get right than tending to the health of inmates, who are sicker and more dependent on alcohol and drugs than people outside. AIDS and hepatitis have torn through cellblocks, and mental illness is a mushrooming problem. In the last decade, state and local government spending for inmate health care has tripled nationwide, to roughly $5 billion a year.
Qualified doctors and nurses are difficult to find, as jails are hardly the most prestigious or best-paying places to work. The potential costs of failure, though, are high - because most inmates will eventually be let out, along with any disease or mental illness that went untreated.
For decades the task fell to state and local governments that typically lacked resources or expertise, acting in sometimes conflicting roles as punisher and medical protector. Often, the results were tragic.
Three skeletons dug up at an Arkansas penal farm in 1968 led to the uncovering of a monstrous system in which a prison hospital served as torture chamber and a doctor as chief tormentor. The 1971 uprising at Attica state prison in upstate New York, which was sparked in part by complaints about health care, left 43 inmates and guards dead. The debacle unleashed a flood of prisoner lawsuits that culminated in a 1976 United States Supreme Court decision declaring that governments must provide adequate medical care in jails and prisons.
But where governments saw a burden, others spotted an opportunity. Two years after the ruling, a Delaware nurse named Doyle Moore founded Prison Health, pioneering a for-profit medical-care industry that offered local officials a grand solution: hand off the headache.
About 40 percent of all inmate medical care in America is now contracted to for-profit companies, led by Prison Health, its closest rival, Correctional Medical Services, and four or five others. Though the remaining 60 percent of inmate care is still supplied by governments, most often by their Health Departments, that number has been shrinking as medical expenses soar.
A few big-city hospitals and other nonprofit enterprises have stepped into the fray, and while not perfect themselves, have performed the best by many accounts, bringing a sense of mission to the work. But that care usually costs more than governments want to spend, and most hospitals are neither equipped nor motivated to enter a jail or prison, where profit margins linger in the single digits.
In this world, where governments are limited in their choices, a half-dozen for-profit companies jockey to underbid each other and promise the biggest savings.
"It's almost like a game of attrition, where the companies will take bids for amounts that you just can't do it," said Dr. Michael Puisis, a national expert and editor of "Clinical Practice in Correctional Medicine," an anthology of articles by doctors. "They figure out how to make money after they get the contract."
Businesses with the most dubious track records can survive, and thrive. When cost-trimming cuts into the quality of care, harming inmates and prompting lawsuits and investigations, governments often see no alternatives but to keep the company, or hire another, then another when that one fails - a revolving-door process that sometimes ends with governments rehiring the company they fired years earlier.
Prison Health has mastered the game. When its mistakes have become public, the company has quietly settled lawsuits and nimbly brokered its exits by quickly resigning, thus preserving its marketable claim that it has never been let go for cause.
Even dissatisfied government clients can be reluctant to discuss their complaints openly, or share them with other counties or states. Some fear being exposed to lawsuits and criticism; others worry that the company dropped this year may return next year as the only bidder for the job. Or, as some former Prison Health customers discovered to their dismay, the new company they hire may be bought by the company they fired.
"You've got the professionals dealing with amateurs," said Dr. Ronald Shansky, a former medical director for the Illinois prison system. He said most sheriffs and jailers were not sophisticated enough about medicine to know what to demand for their money until things go wrong. Local laws requiring that contracts be regularly put out for bid - and go to the lowest bidder - can force officials to switch providers constantly, disrupting care and demoralizing staffs.
Yet once they turn jail medicine over to an outside enterprise, governments rarely go back to providing it themselves. "It's like an article of faith that private is better," Dr. Shansky said, even though a 1997 study comparing government and for-profit prison care, commissioned by the Michigan Department of Corrections, found little difference in cost or quality.
On this playing field, Prison Health has prevailed by thinking big, buying up competitors and creating a nationwide pharmacy to supply its operations. Its revenues have risen in the last decade to an estimated $690 million last year from $110 million in 1994, and its stock has leapt to $27.46 a share - its closing price on Friday - from a split-adjusted price of $3.33.
But day by day, Prison Health - like all of its competitors - faces the most basic challenge: finding people to do the job. For openings in Philadelphia last year, it advertised on a Web page called the Job Resource. "Psychiatrists - Feel shackled to an unsatisfying job? Discover correctional medicine!" said one ad. A Las Vegas posting urged, "Come do some time with us!"
Those who Prison Health hires wind up responsible for the legion of people locked up every day. When the doors shut behind them, the care those prisoners get is shuttered from public view. Deaths behind bars provoke scant outcry.
But if the public has little information about inmates, and not much inclination to care, it may have even less sympathy for the notion that they should die for want of medical attention.
Cutting a Lifeline: For Parkinson's Patient, a Countdown to Death
Four days into his stay at the Schenectady County Jail, it all began to come apart for Brian Richard Tetrault. He could no longer walk the four steps from his bunk to the door of Cell 22, in A-block, where a nurse was waiting with his small ration of pills.
Since his arrest, the state commission said, he had been denied most of the medication he had used for a decade to control his Parkinson's disease and psychological problems. The medical staff knew about his ailments from the day he arrived, soft-spoken and clutching a plastic pill organizer; they even phoned his doctor for his charts.
But the jail's medical director took him off all but two of his seven medications, and nurses concluded that the new inmate was more uncooperative than ill, state investigators said. Mr. Tetrault, a former nuclear scientist at the nearby Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, had only seven days left before an agonizing death that investigators would label "physician induced."
He had grown up in the Albany suburbs, a hunter and amateur mechanic with a gift for mathematics. He joined the Navy, and spent a year on classified missions in a nuclear submarine. By 1990, he had a wife and two sons, a house on a lake and his pick of good-paying jobs in nuclear engineering.
But try as he did to ignore its slow trespass, Parkinson's ruined everything. His sister Barbara first noticed how his hand shook during a game of pinochle. By 1995, Mr. Tetrault was popping prescription Sinemet tablets every two hours to counter the loss of dopamine, a brain chemical vital to muscle function. Every day became a battle with dyskinesia, the drug-induced tremors common to Parkinson's patients.
"He'd call it 'disky,' " said Larry Broderick, a high school friend. "He'd say, 'I'm getting disky.' "
By 2001, the disease had destroyed Mr. Tetrault's marriage and estranged his two teenage sons. His ex-wife, Eileen, had obtained an order of protection as he grew increasingly depressed and angry. That Nov. 10, he stormed into her home while she was away and snatched some items - skis and a push broom - before the police arrived and charged him with burglary and harassment.
His mistreatment began that day, according to the state commission. Without seeing Mr. Tetrault, the jail's medical director, Dr. W. J. Duke Dufresne, prescribed Sinemet and an anti-ulcer drug, but none of the other five medications for his Parkinson's, pain and psychiatric troubles.
On his second day in jail, Mr. Tetrault saw Dr. Dufresne, the only physician for the jail's 300 or so inmates. In a brief visit, the commission said, the doctor reduced even the Sinemet. As for the mental health drugs, Dr. Dufresne later told investigators that only a psychiatrist should prescribe them.
But no one ever arranged for Mr. Tetrault to see the jail psychiatrist, the commission said. And never again did he see Dr. Dufresne, who told investigators he had believed that Mr. Tetrault was merely feeling the typical ups and downs of Parkinson's; he had planned to check on him in three months.
Mr. Tetrault had only days. On his fourth day in jail, medical records show, he grew increasingly "disky" and belligerent, as his body withdrew from the medications that had sustained him for years. On the sixth day, he lay in his bunk, steeped in his own urine and unable to move. "Continues to be manipulative," a nurse wrote.
On the seventh day, the commission said, nurses continued to look in on him, chronicle his deterioration and do little about it. "Inmate remains very stiff," one wrote. "Head arched back, sweating profusely," another noted. A third nurse forced him to walk to the jail clinic, though he could barely move.
On the eighth day, alerted by a nurse's phone call, Dr. Dufresne ordered Mr. Tetrault hospitalized. At Ellis Hospital in Schenectady, emergency-room doctors diagnosed the ravages of his untreated Parkinson's. "I suspect, in the prison setting, he was not getting his full dose of medication as needed," wrote Dr. Richard B. Brooks.
There was not much the hospital could do. On the 10th day, Mr. Tetrault went into septic shock. On the 11th, he died.
The state commission ultimately referred Dr. Dufresne to the State Board for Professional Medical Conduct for what it alleged was "grossly inadequate" care, urged Prison Health to fire him and asked the county to fire Prison Health.
The commission found that Dr. Dufresne had never given Mr. Tetrault a physical examination; and nurses had transcribed the doctor's orders incorrectly, reducing even the Sinemet.
The medical conduct board has taken no action against Dr. Dufresne. The company, in its lawyer's response to the commission, disputed virtually all of the commission's findings, saying that Mr. Tetrault sometimes resisted taking his medication, and that he was well able to move when he wanted. The company's internal one-page review of Mr. Tetrault's care passed no judgment on the doctor or the nurses. But it did recommend six minor changes, like keeping medical records in chronological order. Dr. Dufresne, who is now the company's regional medical director for upstate jails, did not return calls seeking comment.
Richard D. Wright, the president and chief executive of Prison Health, would not discuss details of the case, citing a lawsuit by Mr. Tetrault's son Zachary. He said that over all, Schenectady County "was extremely pleased with the work of the company."
But the county moved to fire Prison Health the day after the commission's report was made public last June. "We were going to terminate them for cause," said Chris Gardner, the county attorney. "But they approached us and we mutually agreed to terminate the relationship."
The humiliation of Mr. Tetrault did not end with his passing, or with Prison Health, the commission said. On the day he died, Nov. 20, 2001, sheriff's officials altered records to change the time of his release from custody, in the early evening, to 2:45 p.m. - 10 minutes before he was pronounced dead, the commission said. The Sheriff's Department denied the charge, and said it had done nothing untoward in trying to formally release Mr. Tetrault.
But the commission said the time change allowed the department to avoid an investigation, at least for a while. Commissioners learned of Mr. Tetrault's death by reading a newspaper article about Zachary's lawsuit, 20 months later.
The Revolving Door: After Trouble in Florida, Moving On, and Up
If Schenectady County was learning hard lessons about Prison Health, it was old news in South Florida, where several counties had tangled, and re-tangled, with the company years earlier.
By the time Pinellas County hired Prison Health in 1992, the company was hitting its stride. Fourteen years after its founding, it had established a wide beachhead in the state, and had just begun a nationwide push that by the end of the decade would put it in the three biggest cities of the Northeast and the prison systems of entire states. A year earlier, the company began selling stock under the name of a holding company, America Service Group.
But for Pinellas, halfway down Florida's Gulf Coast, things were headed downhill.
Everett S. Rice, who was sheriff then, said that Prison Health understaffed the county jail in Clearwater. The company seemed reluctant, he said, to send seriously ill inmates to hospitals, which could cost it thousands of dollars a day. Inmates were regularly showing up in court incompetent to stand trial, said Bob Dillinger, the county public defender, because they were not getting their psychiatric medicines.
The sheriff's office learned that even the most basic care had to be spelled out in the contract. When one inmate died after a delay in calling for help, Mr. Rice said, the agreement was rewritten to require that Prison Health call 911 at a specific time after the start of a medical emergency.
Then, in March 1994, came the death of Diane Nelson, who collapsed of a heart attack in front of the nurse whose words would echo in news reports: "We save money because we skip the ambulance."
Saving money was the reason the county had hired Prison Health. Pinellas was actually on its second round with the company, having first enlisted it in 1986 because of worries about the ballooning costs of the county's own jail health care. When the contract went back out for bid three years later, Pinellas switched to a cheaper competitor; three years after that, Prison Health bid the lowest and retook the job.
But Mr. Rice said the bidding process never turned up a whisper of criticism about Prison Health, or any of its competitors. "Every time we'd be up for renewal, we'd talk to the other counties and institutions, and surprisingly, most of them had glowing reports," he said.
In the end, the deal with Prison Health "probably saved a little money," Mr. Rice said, but the human and political costs were too high. "I thought if I'm going to get the blame for this, I'm going to bring it back inside," he said.
The county did that in April 1995, going back into the business of jail medical care. Three months later, an hour's drive to the east, rural Polk County - which had hired Prison Health the same year as Pinellas - broke off with the company after three inmate deaths that cost Polk taxpayers thousands of dollars in settlements.
"There were instances where we would actually send somebody to the hospital by ambulance because P.H.S. wouldn't do so," said David Bergdoll, counsel to the Polk County Sheriff's office.
Since 1992, at least 15 inmates have died in 11 Florida jails in cases where Prison Health appears to have provided inadequate care, according to documents and interviews with state and county officials.
As it grew, Prison Health proved adept at ingratiating itself with local politicians, hiring lobbyists and contributing to campaigns for sheriff. Under a promise of immunity from prosecution, the nurse who founded the company, Mr. Moore, testified at a 1993 Florida corruption trial that he had paid the Broward County Republican chairman $5,000 a month - "basically extortion," he said - to keep the contract there and in neighboring Palm Beach County.
Some counties say Prison Health has done good work and saved taxpayers money. In Tampa, the medical bill at the Hillsborough County Jail fell to $1.2 million, from $1.8 million in 1982, the year Prison Health replaced the county's medical operation, said Col. David M. Parrish, who runs the jail.
There have been other costs. Last year, the company dismissed a nurse and reprimanded two others after an inmate's baby died; the mother, Kimberly Grey, said in a federal lawsuit that although she had been leaking amniotic fluid for five days, nurses refused to examine her until she gave birth over a cell toilet.
But Colonel Parrish said that mistakes, and second-guessing, were part of the job, no matter who does it. "Anybody who is in the health care business for inmates is going to get blasted because inmates have nothing better to do than complain and sue and find somebody who is going to make a big stink about nothing," he said.
Certainly, a litany of complaints followed as Prison Health expanded across the nation. In Philadelphia, a 1999 federal court monitor's report warned that the company's failure to segregate inmates who were suffering from tuberculosis posed "a public health emergency." Pregnant inmates, it said, were not routinely tested or counseled for H.I.V., endangering their babies.
Dr. Robert Cohen, a state court monitor, said in an interview that Philadelphia doctors "actually encouraged women to refuse pelvic examinations."
Prison Health still works in Philadelphia, where officials have persistently prodded it to improve care. Like many governments, the city has moved from a fixed-cost contract in which the company's profit comes out of whatever it does not spend to one that covers most medical costs and pays Prison Health a management fee.
When other governments have shown less patience, Prison Health has survived, and even grown, by buying rivals like Correctional Health Services, of Verona, N.J. In 1999, its biggest purchase, EMSA Government Services, brought with it contracts with dozens of prisons and jails.
Back in Florida, the purchase brought some unwelcome déjà vu to Polk County, which thought it was through with Prison Health when it hired EMSA. When Prison Health bought EMSA, Polk officials soon replaced it yet again.
"P.H.S. was the lowest bidder, but we didn't accept their bid," said Mr. Bergdoll, the sheriff's counsel. "That should tell you something." Since then, he said, the number of lawsuits has fallen so sharply that the county's insurer lowered its premiums.
The EMSA purchase also brought Prison Health back to Broward County, Fla., which had dropped it years earlier because it had been unhappy with the medical care. Two years after its return, three state judges noticed the phenomenon that had played out in Pinellas - a parade of inmates showing up in court incoherent - and ordered the company to stop withholding psychiatric drugs.
"My impression was that it was money," Judge Susan Lebow said in an interview. "The doctors were under corporate direction to not continue the medications."
Prison Health denies it gave any such order. The Broward sheriff would not comment on the company, which the county replaced again in 2001.
But the revolving door of for-profit health care spins on. Last December, Broward hired Armor Correctional Health Services, a company formed just a few weeks earlier by a familiar figure: Doyle Moore, the nurse who founded Prison Health.
A Jailhouse Birth: Chaos on a Cell Floor as a Baby Is Discovered
It could not have been much worse. A newborn baby lay in a pool of blood on the floor of the Albany County Jail. At least four adults were there: the mother, a registered nurse and two correction officers who struggled to save the tiny boy. But the nurse looked on passively, tending to the dazed mother, convinced that little could be done, state records show.
The baby, who was named Scott Mayo Jr., died two days later.
The mistreatment and missed chances to help the young mother, Aja Venny, began soon after her arrival 11 days earlier, investigators said. A 22-year-old secretary and community-college student from the Bronx, she knew she had done something stupid: taken a ride with a drug dealer she knew from her neighborhood. When a state trooper pulled them over, she stuffed his small bags of drugs into her bra.
She was booked into jail on Aug. 30, 2001, nearly six months pregnant.
The medical staff made an appointment with an obstetrician it paid to visit every two weeks, but Ms. Venny never saw him, state investigators said; nurses ordered her files from a Bronx women's clinic, but never received them. The one concession to her condition, it seems, was her assignment to the maternity unit, a six-bunk cell with a toilet cordoned off by a white curtain.
On Sept. 9, Ms. Venny awoke before dawn with excruciating cramps. Another inmate told the guard that Ms. Venny was about to give birth. After two calls to the nursing supervisor, Donna Hunt, a jail sergeant sent an officer to fetch her immediately.
When she arrived at 7:15 a.m., Ms. Hunt found Ms. Venny sitting on the toilet crying and "blood everywhere," she told investigators. She cleaned off and consoled the inmate, and told the officers to call an ambulance. She said later that she assumed that Ms. Venny had miscarried and saw no reason to check the toilet.
But ambulance technicians, on the phone with the sergeant, asked if there was a baby. Guards looked in the toilet and discovered the infant, still in his placental sac. Officer Dave Verrelli scooped him out using a red biohazard waste bag and laid him on a towel on the cell floor as Nurse Hunt watched.
"I knew that there was probably nothing we could do for this fetus," she told investigators.
Officer Verrelli detected a slight pulse. "What should I do now?" he frantically asked the nurse, who told him to cut open the sac. Officer Verrelli cut it, removed the baby and uncoiled the umbilical cord from its neck. Ms. Hunt confirmed that there was a faint heartbeat, investigators said, but did nothing to get the baby breathing in the quarter-hour before ambulance workers arrived and administered oxygen.
At the hospital, the boy was placed on a ventilator, his heart pumping but his temperature too low to be measured. On his third day of life, he died.
The State Board of Regents found that three Prison Health nurses, including Ms. Hunt, had failed to care properly for Ms. Venny or her baby. Each nurse was placed on a year's probation and fined $500. The State Commission of Correction did not say whether anyone might have saved the child, but it emphasized that Ms. Hunt did not take basic steps to help. She did not return calls seeking comment.
The commission also found more deep-seated failures: a disorganized staff and prenatal training for nurses that consisted of e-mail messages with instructions copied from a university Web site.
Prison Health's lawyers defended Nurse Hunt - saying she found the child in the toilet, but was pushed aside by guards - and accused the commission of ignoring "inconvenient facts."
Ms. Venny, who completed a six-month boot-camp prison program after her son's death, now lives in the Bronx with her husband, Scott, and their 20-month-old daughter, Skye. The ashes of Scott Jr. are kept in a golden urn in the bedroom.
"I know what I was doing was wrong," she said. But still, "I can't find a reason why a baby had to die."
Connecting the Deaths: A Pattern Emerges, and a Battle Begins
It was late 2000 when state investigators began to notice something strange. Reviewing deaths that had occurred in jails in upstate New York, they were not struck by the number or even the grim details of the cases, which they routinely examined as employees of the State Commission of Correction. Something else was wrong.
Working out of a cluttered office in Albany, the three commissioners and a six-member medical review board noticed that low-level employees were doing work normally done by better-credentialed people. Nurses without the proper qualifications, they said, were making medical decisions and pronouncing patients dead.
In Rochester, where Candy Brown had died that September, pleading for help as she withdrew from heroin, investigators found that one of the nurses responsible for her had been suspended by the state three times for negligent care.
In that case and others, commission members said, the people offering the most help and compassion were guards and inmates. And the company, it turned out, was always the same: Prison Health.
"Our sense was that what we were dealing with was not clinical problems but business practices," said James E. Lawrence, the commission's director of operations.
It was the start of a long fight to get the company to change its ways, and when that failed, to get other officials in Albany to step in. Four years later, the commission has been stymied on both fronts.
Mr. Lawrence said Prison Health seemed unfamiliar with New York's tradition of regulated health care, "and dismissive of it." When the agency sought out those in charge, it would often be routed to lawyers or executives at the company's headquarters in Brentwood, Tenn., who bristled at the suggestion that they were answerable to New York State regulators. "The rules were not of any consequence," Mr. Lawrence said.
Prison Health entered New York in 1985 as medical provider for the Dutchess County Jail. Orange and Broome Counties hired the company for a few years, but ended those contracts in the 1990's.
By late 2000, when the company began to attract the state commission's notice, it had signed contracts with Schenectady, Ulster, Monroe and Albany Counties. The Albany jail superintendent at the time called the company "a godsend."
The commission called it a disaster. "Grossly and flagrantly inadequate," for instance, was its verdict on the care given Candy Brown.
Prison Health, in turn, challenged the commission's authority, and even sued over its report on one inmate's treatment, saying the panel had acted maliciously. The suit was dismissed on its merits.
Dr. Carl J. Keldie, the corporation's medical director, said the commission seemed to make up its mind before an investigation and then overstate its case in reports. "The tone, the timbre, the language is egregious," he said. Company executives said the commission has refused to meet and try to reconcile their differences.
The commission in 2001 moved beyond the specific criticisms in its reports to sound a general alarm. Asking state education officials to investigate, it said Prison Health was allowing "dangerously substandard medicine" by hiring doctors and nurses with questionable credentials.
A month later, spurred by the commission, the Department of Education alerted the state attorney general that the company was operating illegally in New York by not having doctors in charge of medical care. "Nobody really noticed that they weren't licensed," one commission doctor said of Prison Health's presence in New York.
In the three years since, nothing has come of either complaint. The only agency with the power to enforce the state law - the attorney general's office - finally replied last October, telling the commission to resolve the matter on its own. In a heated exchange of letters, an assistant attorney general, Ronda C. Lustman, scolded the commission for refusing to meet with executives.
The company says that it is acting legally because it has set up local corporations with doctors in charge. But there is abundant evidence, state investigators say, that those corporations are shams.
For example, Dr. Trevor Parks is listed as the sole shareholder of P.H.S. Medical Services P.C., which the company says provides all medical care at Rikers Island, free of any influence from Prison Health executives. But investigators say that when they interviewed him, he had little idea of his role, or his corporation's.
Moreover, records show that Dr. Parks's corporation went out of business in July, for nonpayment of taxes and fees. After The Times pointed that out to company executives in December, Prison Health paid the money. Dr. Parks did not respond to phone calls and e-mail messages.
If frustration mounted at the commission, a sense of impending trouble was growing at the jail in Albany County, where the commission said doctors' decisions on inmate treatment were being overruled by a regional medical director in Washington who was not licensed to practice in New York.
The doctor, Akin Ayeni, said in an interview that he never overruled any doctor there. But a former medical director at the jail said she quit in April 2001 because she felt the company's policies, and Dr. Ayeni's decisions, were dangerous.
"I told my staff, 'I know it's only a matter of time before they kill someone,' " she said, asking that her name not be used because she feared retribution. "I knew there was going to be a death. I could feel it."
In the six months after she left, two people died and a third was seriously injured after poor treatment by Prison Health, the state commission found; the dead included Aja Venny's newborn son.
The county and the company parted ways six months later, said Thomas J. Wigger, the jail superintendent, because he was unsatisfied with the quality of care.
One by one, other counties have followed suit. Ulster County, for example, caught Prison Health overbilling it for thousands of dollars of nurse hours and switched to another company in 2001. The company, for its part, said it lost most of the upstate contracts to competitors who had underbid them. Strangely, it said it had no record of working in Orange County, even though the state commission faulted the company in two inmate deaths, in 1989 and 1990.
Last October, Schenectady County dropped Prison Health after the death of Mr. Tetrault, the inmate with Parkinson's disease. The jail director, Maj. Robert Elwell, said in an interview that the medical director, Dr. Dufresne, had discouraged treatment for anything but the most urgent problems. "When you're dealing with a for-profit corporation, those are the types of decisions that get made," Major Elwell said.
The company's only remaining outpost in upstate New York is Dutchess County. "I believe they are a good company," said David W. Rugar, the county jail administrator. "It's just an intense thing to do, when you provide medical services."
Indeed, just days before it renewed its deal with Prison Health in 2002, the jail had an intense experience that would cost the company's medical director there his job.
Cries From the Heart: Despite Days of Agony, 'Nobody Will Help Me'
When they cleaned out Cell 6 in Unit 10 on Feb. 16, 2002, workers at the Dutchess County Jail found a letter that Victoria Williams Smith had written to her husband.
"My chest is tight & burns, my arms are numb," it said. "I been to the nurse about five times & no body will help me. I need to get out of this jail. It feels like I'm having a stroke, no bull."
Actually, it was a heart attack, and it had killed Ms. Smith a few hours earlier at the age of 35. The letter was just one in a skein of increasingly panicked pleas for help during her last 10 days in jail.
Ms. Smith was born in Brooklyn, but settled in North Carolina with her second husband, Justin Smith. They married in 1997, shortly after he was sent to a prison in Dutchess County for attempted robbery.
She shipped him canned food that he could sell for cash, and in January 2002 drove to the prison for what friends said was a visit allowed to married couples.
The reunion was called off by state troopers, who were waiting at the prison to search her. They found about seven ounces of heroin clearly intended for her husband to use or sell, state records show.
Thirteen days passed, state investigators said, before Ms. Smith was examined by a doctor: Vidyadhara A. Kagali, the part-time medical director at the jail in Poughkeepsie, who worked only on Wednesday and Friday evenings even though he was responsible for about 300 inmates.
She could have hoped for better. Dr. Kagali, who was board certified only as a pathologist, had never treated patients in a hospital and had "limited knowledge of his responsibilities as jail medical director," according to commission records.
On Feb. 6, when she began to complain of chest pains and numbness, Dr. Kagali told her she was suffering from inflamed cartilage in her chest, and had her continue taking the Vioxx arthritis medication that friends in North Carolina mailed to her.
The next day, after Ms. Smith was found crying in pain in her cell, an electrocardiogram revealed abnormalities in her heart. But Dr. Kagali, notified by a nurse, did not see her, according to the state commission. On her third day in jail, records show, a second EKG showed the same heart problem, but the doctor still did not see her.
On the seventh day, a nurse turned to the jail's part-time psychiatrist for help in easing Ms. Smith's chest pain and labored breathing. Without seeing her, he prescribed a drug for intestinal problems. On the eighth day, Dr. Kagali saw Ms. Smith; he ordered a spinal X-ray and recommended Bengay.
Two days later, in tears, she phoned her North Carolina friends, Chris and Marjorie Bowers, three times. "She said these people would not help her at all," Ms. Bowers said.
In the early morning of Feb. 16, Ms. Smith's untreated heart ailment became an emergency, according to jail records and sworn statements from nurses and guards. Around 4:30 a.m., a guard found her rocking on her bunk, clutching her chest, and called Barbara Light, the registered nurse on duty.
Ms. Light concluded that Ms. Smith was having an anxiety attack - even though, the commission said, the nurse had never seen the inmate's medical record.
A half-hour later, Ms. Smith, weeping, told the guard she wanted to go to a hospital - a plea Nurse Light dismissed as an attempt to get drugs. Minutes after that, the guard placed a frantic third call to the nurse, who arrived to find the inmate on the floor, shaking. An ambulance rushed Ms. Smith to Vassar Brothers Medical Center, where she died in less than an hour.
The state commission, in its report, seemed hardly to know where to begin to catalog the failures.
It urged that Dr. Kagali be fired for "gross incompetence," and referred Ms. Light to state regulators for discipline. State health authorities eventually suspended the doctor's license for six months, but have not taken action against Ms. Light. Neither she nor Dr. Kagali would comment.
The company's confidential review of Ms. Smith's death found no fault with her treatment, but recommended that its staff offer grief counseling to colleagues and inmates after future jail deaths.
In a letter to the commission, Prison Health defended Ms. Light and Dr. Kagali. It said that over Ms. Smith's five weeks in jail the doctor had seen her numerous times and provided medications, knee braces and even an extra mattress for her arthritis. Ms. Smith had no known history of heart disease, the company said, and any suggestion that her death could have been prevented was "20-20 hindsight."
The letter was signed by Dr. Dufresne, whom the commission would later blame for Brian Tetrault's death.
Joseph Plambeck contributed reporting for this article.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Posted by lois at 02:49 PM | Comments (0)
February 26, 2005
CO: Sex, contraband in Private Prison for Women
Casper Star Tribune Friday, February 25, 2005
By The Associated Press
DENVER (AP) -- The warden of the privately run Brush Correctional Facility for Women has resigned and five officers face sexual misconduct and contraband charges.
Warden Rick Soares quit Tennessee-based GRW, which owns the 250-bed prison in Brush, on Feb. 18, said Alison Morgan, spokeswoman for the state corrections department. The warden was not implicated in any wrongdoing.
The facility, which became the first private prison for women in Colorado in August 2003, holds 80 inmates from Hawaii, 73 from Colorado and 45 from Wyoming.
The corrections department referred contraband allegations involving two staff members and one inmate and sexual misconduct allegations involving three staff members to District Attorney Robert Watson on Thursday.
Three officers had sex with four Hawaiian inmates, two Colorado inmates and one Wyoming inmate, Morgan said. Two of the officers have resigned and a third is on administrative leave.
Some of the women say they were raped, but investigators concluded the sex was consensual and sometimes was initiated by inmates, Morgan said. Having sex with inmates is a felony offense for correctional officers.
She said some Hawaiian and Wyoming inmates acknowledged they had sex with the guards because they believed they would be returned home, where they would be closer to relatives.
As for the contraband allegations, Morgan said two officers and an inmate were caught sneaking tobacco into the prison on the plains of northeastern Colorado.
The Department of Corrections is sending 20 experts to train and mentor Brush prison officers for the next 30 days, she said.
http://www.casperstartribune.net/news/wyoming/613d3e097c73fe0887256fb30045d313.txt
Posted by lois at 10:31 AM | Comments (0)
Kansas AG Seeks Late Term Abortion Records
February 25, 2005
Kan. AG Seeks Late - Term Abortion Records
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) -- The Kansas attorney general, a staunch opponent of abortion, has demanded the medical records of nearly 90 woman and girls who had late-term abortions, saying he needs the material to investigate crimes.
The two abortion clinics involved in the case say the state has no right to such personal information and are fighting the request in the Kansas Supreme Court.
But Attorney General Phill Kline insisted Thursday he needs the records because he has ``the duty to investigate and prosecute child rape and other crimes in order to protect Kansas children.''
Sex involving someone under 16 is illegal in Kansas, and it is illegal in the state for doctors to perform an abortion after 22 weeks unless there is reason to believe it is needed to protect the mother's health.
Kline spoke to reporters after details of the secret investigation, which began in October, surfaced in a legal brief filed by attorneys for the two clinics. The clinics argued that unless the high court intervenes, women who obtained abortions could find government agents knocking at their door.
The clinics said Kline demanded their complete, unedited medical records for women and girls who sought abortions at least 22 weeks into their pregnancies in 2003. Court papers did not identify the clinics.
The records sought include the patient's name, medical history, details of her sex life, birth control practices and psychological profile.
The clinics are offering to provide records with some key information, including names, edited out.
``These women's rights will be sacrificed if this fishing expedition is not halted or narrowed,'' the clinics said in court papers.
On Oct. 21, state District Judge Richard Anderson ruled that Kline could have the files. The clinics then filed an appeal with the high court. No hearing has been scheduled.
The clinics outlined their legal arguments in a brief filed Tuesday. Though other documents in the case remain sealed, the brief filed Tuesday was not, and The Wichita Eagle disclosed Kline's investigation in a story published Thursday.
In their brief, the clinics' attorneys said a gag order prevents the clinics from even disclosing to patients that their records are being sought. Attorneys declined to comment Thursday, citing the order.
``You can see our desire to discuss as much as possible, but we feel constrained,'' said attorney Lee Thompson.
Thompson declined to say if his client was Dr. George Tiller, whose Wichita clinic is known as a provider of late-term abortions and is a frequent target of abortion opponents.
Kline would not discuss the scope of the investigation. Recently, Kline's office helped Texas authorities gather information from Tiller regarding a pregnant teenager who sought his care and died in Kansas.
Kline in 2003 began pushing to require health care professionals to report underage sexual activity. Kline contends state law requires such reporting, but a federal judge blocked him. The case has yet to be resolved.
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press
Posted by lois at 10:08 AM | Comments (0)
February 24, 2005
Ban on Voting for People with Felony Convictions Hurts Blacks and Democrats
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, AlterNet
Posted on February 17, 2005, Printed on February 24, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21300/
During the last presidential campaign Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry tepidly spoke out against the ban by some states on ex-felon voting. He should have shouted out against it. The ban hurts Democrats far more than Republicans. Blacks make up a huge percentage of those barred from voting because of a prison stint. They are far more likely to vote Democrat than Republican.
The ex-felon vote ban in Florida in 2000 did much to snatch the White House from Al Gore. The ban on ex-felon voting also may have deprived Kerry of thousands of potential votes in Ohio. That almost certainly helped swell Bush's vote total in that pivotal state, and insure his White House return. Kerry, and top Democrats have said and done little since the election to get states to modify or scrap their vote bans. The Sentencing Project, in a recent report, again noted that more than a dozen states still permanently bar ex-cons from voting, or make it so difficult for them to get their rights restored that for all practical purposes they're banned from voting for life. Blacks are still the hardest hit by the bans. One in four adult black men are effectively disenfranchised by the bans.
It's no accident that five of the dozen states that perpetuate this morally and legally indefensible practice are Southern states. The South has had a long and deplorable history of devising an arsenal of racially abusive tactics including poll taxes, literacy laws and political gerrymandering to drive blacks from the voting booths.
This thinly disguised relic of the South's Jim Crow past has done much to drastically dilute black political strength. In 1996 about 4.5 million black men voted in the presidential election. If the 1 million black men in prison, on parole, or probation that were disenfranchised because of their criminal record had been added to the total their vote might have made a crucial difference in deciding close statewide contests.
Black ex-felon disenfranchisement will probably get worse. Blacks now make up nearly half of the more than 2 million prisoners in the nation's jails. The entrenchment of racially biased drug laws, racial profiling, and chronic poverty in many black communities means that more black men will be arrested, prosecuted, convicted and serve longer prison sentences than white men. This virtually guarantees that the number of blacks behind bars will swell. The Sentencing Project estimates that at the present rate of black incarceration upwards of 40 percent of black men could be permanently barred from the polls in the vote restricted states in the next few years. And since most state officials are scared stiff of being publicly labeled as soft on crime, state legislatures have either ignored the issue or stonewalled legislation that would end the archaic practice.
Congress can take a big step toward rectifying this blatant injustice by passing the still pending Civic Participation and Rehabilitation Act. It would not effect voting in state elections but it would restore voting rights to ex-felons in federal elections.
It will take a fierce fight to get this bill passed. Many conservatives passionately defend the policy of ex-felon disenfranchisement. They claim that in barring criminals from voting society sends the strong message that if you break the law you should pay, and continue to pay dearly. The argument might make sense if all or most of the disenfranchised ex-felons were convicted murderers, rapists or robbers. And they were denied the vote because of a court-imposed sentence. This is not the case.
None of the states that bar felons from voting in near perpetuity require that judges strip them of their voting rights as part of their sentence based on the seriousness of the crime or the severity of the punishment. The majority of ex-felons are jailed for non-violent crimes such as drug possession, passing bad checks, or auto theft. In most instances they fully served their sentence and in theory paid their debt to society.
Most of the convicted felons were young men when they committed their crime. The odds are that most of them won't become career criminals, but will hold steady jobs, raise families and become responsible members of the community. Yet imprinting these ex-felons with the legal and social stigma of "hereditary criminals" and banning them from voting until death makes politicians and many Americans seem like the worst kind of hypocrites when they say they believe in giving prisoners a second chance in life.
Civil liberties groups and civil rights organizations must fight harder against the bans. That means filing court challenges and mounting a sustained lobbying campaign in Congress or state legislatures to get the discriminatory voting laws changed.
The denial of voting rights to thousands of blacks decades after the end of slavery and legal segregation is a travesty of justice, and a blot on the democratic process. It will also cost the Democrats thousands of votes and maybe even the White House in the next presidential election.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21300/
Posted by lois at 10:18 PM | Comments (0)
People with felony convictions could vote under Let Every Vote Count Legislation
"....In addition, Count Every Vote would allow ex-felons to vote in federal elections...."
2/23/2005
By Matthew Cardinale
The House Democrat who signed the challenge to Ohio’s electoral votes spoke passionately about her new Count Every Vote Act, a bill aimed at enhancing federal election standards to address problems which arose in recent elections. The bill, said Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones (D-OH), seeks to ensure guidelines regarding provisional ballots and paper records for electronic voting. It would also create a federal voting holiday and allow ex-felons to vote. Tubbs-Jones, a former judge, relished the opportunity to flesh out the bill, saying Tuesday that the mainstream press had focused largely on specific provisions. “I was on a radio show recently and the guy kept wanting to focus on the provision to make Election Day a national holiday,†Rep. Tubbs-Jones said.
The Sentate version of the bill was introduced by Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) on behalf of Sens. Boxer (D-CA), Kerry (D-MA), Lautenberg (D-NJ), and Milkulski (D-MD). Comparable legislation was introduced by Tubbs-Jones (D-OH) in the House. The bill would mandate certain aspects of how states run federal elections. It would require a voter-verified paper trail for electronic voting, create uniform standards for provisional ballots, and make Election Day a national holiday.
In addition, Count Every Vote would allow ex-felons to vote in federal elections, make electronic voting source codes available for government record, and prevent Secretaries of State from participating in partisan campaign activities.
The bill also includes federal funding provisions to assist states’ compliance. Common Cause, a progressive advocacy group, said they appreciated the fact the bill addressed myriad issues. “While there are other specific single bills already out there, like the paper trail for electronic voting bill, this bill is meant to set the Gold Standard for fixing these problems,†Common Cause Vice President of Policy and Research Ed Davis said. “The federal government has passed very few mandates regarding voting,†Davis added. “Even if they are specific to federal elections, it typically pushes states to follow them too, because it doesn’t make much sense for states to hold two separate elections.†Paper Trail Rep. Tubbs-Jones asserts that a paper trail for electronic voting is essential. “Computers are by no means flawless,†the congresswoman told
“We brandish freedom and democracy around the world; why not here?†she asked. Provisional Ballots Count Every Vote also provides guidelines for creating a uniform process of handling provisional ballots. “In Ohio in 2004, our Secretary of State [Kenneth Blackwell] issued different rules in the Primary Election and the General Election regarding provisional ballots,†Congresswoman Tubbs-Jones said. “What he did was within the law–but the point is, he made it so restrictive. Currently states’ laws on provisional ballots are so different.†“Provisional ballots are really a backup,†added Ed Davis of Common Cause. “The problem is not usually with voters, but with voter lists. There are duplicate names, or sometimes states purge the names of people who should be registered.
“Different states purge voters for a variety of reasons; some states do it because a person didn’t vote in the last two years,†Davis continued.
“Also, sometimes officials will tell voters to go to the wrong polling place… Then on Election Day, there’s no time to direct people to the right precinct, that is, if polling places even have that information,†he added. “If you show up at the wrong precinct in some states, they won’t count your ballot. You shouldn’t be prevented from voting for President for any reason.†Davis says Democrats
Click Here
will need to win over Republicans to get the legislation passed. In the overall elections policy landscape this year, Davis explained, “Republicans are more concerned with voter fraud, and Democrats think it should be easier for people to vote,” and that voter fraud is not as a widespread problem as voting barriers and disenfranchisement. “Republicans have tried to avoid this issue because to admit that something needs to be fixed is like admitting something was wrong with the 2004 election,†Davis added.
Matthew Cardinale is a freelance writer, advocate, and graduate student in sociology and democracy studies. He may be reached at mcardina@uci.edu. Other news related to mass incarceration can be found at www.
Posted by lois at 10:13 PM | Comments (0)
Confusing Rules Deny Vote to People With Felony Convictions
February 20, 2005, NY Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 - An estimated 1.5 million former convicts are unable to vote in 14 states around the country because of state policies that make it cumbersome, confusing and difficult for them to return to voter rolls after completing their sentences, according to a new study.
Fewer than 3 percent of felons in those states have managed to register to vote after finishing their sentences, according to the study released Wednesday by the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit research group that favors more liberal sentencing policies for criminals.
In Mississippi, for instance, just 107 of more than 82,000 felons have had their voting rights restored since 1992 after completing their sentences, the study found, and in Nebraska, the tally was 343 of more than 44,000.
The question of whether and how former convicts should be allowed to vote has generated a growing nationwide debate in recent months.
The issue became contentious in Florida in the 2000 election and again last year because of accusations that felons, many of them members of minority groups, were effectively being blocked from re-registering, while some Republicans in Washington State asserted that felons were voting illegally in last year's close race for governor.
The Supreme Court declined last year to consider differing interpretations from two appellate courts on the power of states to strip felons of the right to vote. Legislators in some states have pushed to loosen restrictions on registering felons, but others have advocated expanding the types of crimes that would make an offender ineligible to vote.
At the federal level, Democrats in the Senate and House, including Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barbara Boxer of California, introduced legislation this week that addresses the issue. Among a host of other proposals for ensuring that "every vote is counted," the legislation seeks to restore voting rights "for felons who have repaid their debt to society" and would require states to end the practice of denying voting rights to felons who have completed their prison terms, parole or probation, the sponsors said.
The Sentencing Project said its study was the first to survey how frequently felons were denied voting rights in states with restrictive policies. It examined 14 states that do not automatically restore voting rights to felons after they complete their sentences. Those states are Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington and Wyoming.
The study found that Florida, with 48,000 felons returned to voting ranks, was the only state where a significant number had their voting rights restored, but only after extended court battles there.
The report blamed long and confusing waiting periods before felons can seek voting eligibility, inadequate data in state records systems, and arbitrary standards. Some states, like Florida and Kentucky, employ "character tests" that allow state officials to ask felons about their drinking habits or to require them to submit letters of reference in applying for voting rights, the report said.
"What we found is that the procedures in many states for restoring felons' voting rights are so little used and so cumbersome that the possibility of getting restored voting rights for many of these people is just illusory," Marc Mauer, the assistant director of the Sentencing Project, said in an interview.
Several officials involved in state voting procedures did not dispute the study's findings but said they were taking steps to make it easier for felons to register when allowed by state law.
Meredith Imwalle, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Secretaries of State, said a continuing overhaul of state voting databases should help to ease the problem by linking voter rolls in many states to criminal and corrections records.
In Mississippi, a state singled out by the Sentencing Project, a felon guilty of murder, rape or a number of other crimes that result in disenfranchisement must appeal to the governor or the Legislature to regain the right to vote.
"I would say that it is rare for that to happen, as the numbers in this study seem to reflect, so it may in fact be easier for a felon to regain the right to vote in other states," said David Blount, a spokesman for the Mississippi secretary of state's office.
But Mr. Blount said Mississippi, like some other states, was limited in its options because it would take an amendment to the State Constitution to change the procedure.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Posted by lois at 10:04 PM | Comments (0)
Eastern NY Correctional Facility: "Uncaptive Minds"
February 20, 2005, NY Times Magazine
By IAN BURUMA
''The admission process,'' Kenner said recently, ''is emotionally the hardest part of our work. Up to 200 apply for 15 spots.'' Only 50 students, out of a prison population of more than 1,200, are now enrolled. "
The main business of Napanoch, N.Y., is a maximum-security prison, Eastern New York Correctional Facility, also known as Happy Nap. The population of Eastern, 1,250 men, many from New York City, is about the same as that of Napanoch itself. Imposing in a hideous kind of way, the prison, built at the end of the 19th century, is modeled after a medieval fortress, with towers and turrets and a pyramid roof. The overall effect -- stony pomposity framed by lush green hills -- is rather Germanic.
There is nothing particularly happy about Napanoch, situated on the raffish edges of the Catskills about 70 miles north of Manhattan; its better days as an affordable resort area for New York and New Jersey Jews have long gone. There are a few motels nearby with cracked signs that read Starlite and Eldorado; a diner; a Jewish cemetery; and a ''colony farm,'' where the original inmates of Eastern, mentally impaired delinquents, were put to work in the early decades of the 20th century.
There is, however, a reason that inmates call the prison Happy Nap. Eastern is more relaxed than other maximum-security prisons, or ''maxes,'' in upstate New York, with less hostility between staff and prisoners, and as a result fewer U.I.'s, or ''unusual incidents'' -- stabbings and the like. It is said that the farther upstate you go, the harsher the prison conditions can be. Among New York's maxes, Eastern has one of the best reputations. It is one of only three maximum-security prisons in the state where you can still get an education -- not just in manual skills, but a proper college education with a degree at the end, thanks to privately financed initiatives.
One person to have benefited from such an education is Mika'il DeVeaux, a slim, 48-year-old black man who served 25 years for murder. DeVeaux studied theology at Sing Sing and got an M.A. in sociology. After he was released in October 2003, he founded an organization in New York with his wife called Citizens Against Recidivism. DeVeaux likes to point out how much prison education reduces the chances of ex-convicts falling back through the revolving door of crime and imprisonment. That's why, according to DeVeaux, ''Eastern is the place to be.''
Education programs used to be widely available in prisons in the United States, especially after the notorious Attica rebellion in 1971, which left 43 dead. Among the demands of the inmates, who were pressing for improved prison conditions, was a better education program. This demand was met, not only at Attica but also in prisons around the country. Over the next decades, prison education flourished. Then, in 1994, Congress effectively abolished all federally financed college education for prison inmates when it voted to eliminate Pell Grants for federal and state prisons, despite strong resistance from the Department of Education. Critics pointed out that education greatly reduces recidivism; only one-tenth of 1 percent of the Pell Grant budget went to the education of prisoners anyway. But Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican of Texas, argued that it was unfair for felons to benefit from Pell Grants when as many as 100,000 low-income students were denied them each year. Why should prisoners be educated for nothing when so many honest folks failed to get a break? And besides, she said, the federal government already spent upward of $100 million on prison education and training programs. Today, what federal money is spent on prisoner education goes largely toward vocational training.
Hutchison's arguments arose from a more generalized desire -- not just among Republicans -- to get tough on crime, or more precisely on criminals. Even though crime rates were actually dropping in the 90's, many argued that judges were letting felons off too lightly and that the ''rights'' of victims needed to be taken into account. Thus, beginning in the early 90's, prison regimes were tightened, even as mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws meant more and more people came into the system and stayed. In this climate few politicians were ready to stand up for higher-education programs for prisoners. Before 1995 there were some 350 college-degree programs for prisoners in the United States. Today there are about a dozen, four of them in New York State.
The Bard prison initiative was set up by Max Kenner, who graduated from Bard College in 2001. After Kenner finished school, he spent the summer driving around from prison to prison, meeting with staff members and inmates to find out what kind of education program was most needed. He found many administrators receptive to the idea of a higher-education program; there was overwhelming enthusiasm among the inmates. And Eastern, thanks to its relatively liberal regime under its superintendent, David Miller, was the most hospitable, and agreed to be host of the pilot program.
The Bard Prison Initiative now runs an associate degree program at Eastern. There are plans to introduce a bachelor's program soon. Inmates have to go through an application process like any prospective college student: an essay, test scores, transcripts (G.E.D.'s for those who didn't finish high school) and an interview by Kenner and his colleague Daniel Karpowitz. ''The admission process,'' Kenner said recently, ''is emotionally the hardest part of our work. Up to 200 apply for 15 spots.'' Only 50 students, out of a prison population of more than 1,200, are now enrolled.
I'd been teaching at Bard during the spring semester for several years, commuting from London, where I lived, so I knew about the program. When I signed up last year, Kenner told me the students would be interested in learning about East Asian culture. So, somewhat to my surprise, I found myself teaching a course in modern Japanese history. The idea of talking about samurai rebellions, Japanese imperialism and General MacArthur's occupation to men who were in for drug dealing, grand larceny and murder, was certainly intriguing but also somewhat daunting. How much did they know? How should I approach the material? Would they be at all receptive?
entered Eastern on a cold day last February. Flurries of sleet made the fortresslike prison look even bleaker than usual. After being put through a metal detector and frisked, I heard the iron gates close behind me with a thud. My ''escort,'' in charge of education, was a friendly woman named Theresa with the jaunty air of a popular coach.
The first thing you notice inside is the spotlessness of the floors, which is no wonder, since there are always men around mopping and buffing. We walked through a narrow corridor with yellow lines on the floor. Inmates in olive green uniforms filing past us greeted Theresa with elaborate courtesy. Several blind men were being led around by fellow prisoners. Being physically impaired has its advantages; a bit more leniency is shown by the guards, which is why, Kenner told me, some prisoners pretend to be blind or deaf, a ruse that rarely works for long. One young white prisoner greeted me in German. I showed my surprise. ''Ja,'' he said, ''I'm the only one.'' Then I noticed a peculiar smell. Theresa must have spotted my wrinkled nose. ''Skunks,'' she explained. ''There are skunks under the floors.''
My first class was held in the vocational section, where inmates engage in metalwork and other manual tasks. Eastern is well known as a producer of dog tags and street signs. Since prison rules dictate that all men in ''voc'' wear work boots and pass through metal detectors, my students did not like coming here. It meant they had to take off their boots and belts and submit to a body search, always a humiliating business. My class of nine consisted of a Puerto Rican, who had been to the Bronx High School of Science, one of New York's prestigious magnet schools; two white military veterans; a Vietnamese-American; four black men, two of them Muslims; and one young white man who had been incarcerated since he was 16.
I had been assured by Kenner and Karpowitz that the students would be enthusiastic. This was an understatement. But as I learned in my first weeks of teaching, the main difference between these students and those on the Bard campus was their polite formality. I was invariably addressed as ''professor,'' not so much for my sake, I sensed, as for their own self-respect. Somewhat patronizingly, I suppose, I had expected talk about sword-fight movies and Oriental wisdom. Instead, from the very start, questions of a far more sophisticated kind came quick and fast: about the economics of the Opium Wars in China, about the criminal activities of unemployed samurai, about the impact on Japanese cultural identity of Western ideas. One of the black Muslims, a tough New Yorker, mentioned Alexis de Tocqueville in the context of the Meiji Restoration.
The students were smart, streetwise and funny, and I found it impossible not to be charmed by them. They were also clearly grateful to be in class, where they were treated as intelligent adults. It is easy to feel a little smug about dealing with these men, to feel a sentimental solidarity with them against the guards and the rest of their oppressive world. This soon leads to the kind of phoniness that any inmate can see through in an instant.
One form observed in prison is that you don't ask what someone is in for -- unless you're in for something, too. You may not get a straight answer anyway. Deputy Superintendent Sheryl Butler, a spirited woman in her 50's, told me that I didn't want to know the students' crimes. ''Otherwise you can't deal with them objectively,'' she said. Kenner told me the same thing. But I couldn't contain my curiosity and looked up their sentences on the department of corrections Web site. Of course, even what I could find out didn't tell me much: second-degree murder could be armed robbery, a gangland killing, the murder of a wife. But it helped me to keep some perspective whenever I was tempted to see the inmates purely as victims, suppressed by vicious guards.
I never witnessed any serious oppression, just the imposition of endless petty rules. The students remained remarkably calm, even when they were provoked. They knew they had no choice. It was hard enough getting into the education program. One false move could cost a student his place in the classroom, and in Happy Nap too.
It is a tricky situation. Education widens the gap between students and corrections officers and can easily increase hostility. Many of the officers have not been to college themselves and probably don't expect their children to either. But higher-education programs should also make life easier for the C.O.'s, since the prisoners who benefit from them are more inclined to behave themselves. Indeed, a C.O. once told a colleague of mine that life at Eastern was a trifle dull. At the previous institution where he'd worked there were shakedowns, stabbings on the galleries, mayhem in the solitary-housing unit. At Eastern, a guard was liable to fall asleep.
My second class was on the failed samurai rebellion in the 1870's against the Westernized Meiji government, on which the movie ''The Last Samurai'' was very loosely based. I mentioned a book, by Ivan Morris, titled ''The Nobility of Failure,'' and explained the admiration in Japan for rebels who die for lost causes. We discussed how this ethos compared with the American celebration of success. Perhaps, I said a bit facetiously, there was no such thing as a noble failure in America. One Muslim among my students laughed and said, ''This room's full of them.''
Everyone had his own story, one that could quickly curdle into despair. One warm day in April, after two months of teaching, I attended an anniversary celebration of the Bard Prison Initiative at Eastern. A jazz band of inmates and volunteers was playing in the yard, while prisoners in white aprons served lemonade and chocolate cake. Speeches were made, by inmates and by Superintendent Miller, who has the avuncular manner of a rural bank manager. Words like ''respect'' and ''future'' and ''self-improvement'' flew thick and fast. The sun was shining, but one of my students, catching my eye, whispered, ''It's miserable.''
Stories of failure and despair vary. You can never be sure how much is true. His came in a flood of words: regularly beaten by a drunken stepfather, kicked out of the house at 14, placed in a foster home, where he felt sheltered for the first time in his life until he discovered that the foster father was sexually abusing his charges. He was so incensed, he said, that he killed the man with a kitchen knife. He told me that he still becomes enraged at the thought of men abusing innocent women and children. Since he's been in jail, he has spent most of his time reading and writing. Books are his salvation, he said. He dreams of being a famous author. He has at least 12 1/2 more years of his sentence to go.
It was obvious to me, as a teacher, how precious education was to the students, not only because they could practically recite every sentence of the books and articles I gave them to read but also because of the way they behaved to one another. Prisons breed cynicism. Trust is frequently betrayed and friendships severed when a prisoner is transferred without warning to another facility. The classroom was an exception. We talked about Japanese history, but also about other things; one topic led to another. One day a guest lecturer spoke about pan-Asianism in the 1930's -- the Japanese aim to unite and dominate Asia by defeating the Western empires. My Vietnamese student remarked that he was a pan-Asianist with ''a small a,'' but that really he was a ''panhumanist,'' for ''we are all one race, right?'' One of the black students snorted in a good-natured way. The Vietnamese smiled and said: ''I know we have disagreements about that.''
There cannot be many places -- in or outside prison -- where blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Muslims and Caucasians can discuss race and religion without showing hostility. A Muslim student, a big man from the Bronx, said he'd encountered little animosity to Muslims in prison. ''Sure, that's because we know each other,'' another student said. I found this surprising, since prisons are not known for racial or religious tolerance. But perhaps they were referring not to the prison system in general, or even to the narrower confines of Eastern, but simply to the class. Then a black student, in for robbery, piped up: ''If I hadn't been in prison, I'd never have met any Jewish guys. I had all the stereotypes in my head, you know, cheap and mean. But now I'm hanging with a Jewish guy the longest time.''
Eastern is different. But why? Why was Eastern more receptive to the Bard Prison Initiative than other prisons in the state? Why is Eastern ''the place to be''? Several men pointed out that ''the tone is set by the top.'' The superintendent and his deputy both started their careers as teachers.
Deputy Superintendent Butler likes to refer to Eastern as a ''therapeutic community.'' She has spent decades of her life inside the prison. Her son works there now. Eastern is her community, too. Walking around the prison one day, she sounded almost wistful when she told me about the flowers she'd received from inmates when she was hospitalized for a serious illness. I asked her about the trouble that inmates had making friends, when they know they might be transferred at any time. She replied that inmates get ''very attached to staff, too, you know. They have tears when they leave. We bring them up, like our children.''
This is not the kind of thing you'd expect to hear from corrections officers in most maximum-security facilities. There is no doubting Butler's benevolent intentions. Like her boss, Butler has been consistently supportive of education programs at Eastern. And the relative decency with which inmates are treated by the C.O.'s has much to do with the example set by Miller and Butler.
Something Butler said to me still sticks in my mind. She was speaking about the benefits of education for men who would never leave prison. ''You know,'' she said, ''if you have a body'' -- that is, if you've been involved in a murder -- ''you're in for life.'' She kept returning to this point, even though most men do eventually get out. It was almost as if Butler did not really want her charges to leave.
I spoke about my impression to Mika'il DeVeaux, the ex-convict who started Citizens Against Recidivism. ''Deputy Butler,'' he said, ''wants to be the Eastern mother. She'll mother you, and if that's not what you want, she'll bully you.'' This can be disconcerting to some inmates. I heard one of them say that at least in more ''old-fashioned'' institutions, you knew where you stood; it was ''us'' against ''them,'' and a prisoner would not even dream of talking to a C.O. And yet, as DeVeaux also pointed out, ''it is a rare man who asks to be transferred out of Eastern.''
Butler has known some prisoners for many years. I knew my students for only a few months. Yet I, too, found it hard to say goodbye. It is difficult to know what they really think of the teachers. We were not C.O.'s, to be sure, but still people on the outside. I do know what they think of Max Kenner, who threw them a lifeline when the government refused them an education. He is a hero to men who had little confidence left in humanity, including their own. It isn't much -- a few dozen men out of a thousand who can study for a Bard College degree, but to those men it is everything. It costs the state about $32,000 a year to keep a person in jail. It costs the Bard Prison Initiative only $2,000 to provide a student with a year of college education.
On my last day at Eastern, I turned back toward the prison as I was leaving. There, high above me, I could just make out a face, pressed against the bars of a cell. It was my youngest student, the one who knifed his foster father. As I drove off, I glanced into my rearview mirror. All that moved in the mass of brick and steel bars behind me was a pale arm waving.
Ian Buruma, a teacher at Bard, last wrote for the magazine about Iraq.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Posted by lois at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)
TX: ACLU Calls for Taser Moratorium
Feb. 23, 2005, 12:34PM
Policy review is needed after man's death, ACLU says
By PEGGY O'HARE
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
The American Civil Liberties Union is calling for police departments across Texas to stop using Tasers until policies and training are reviewed in the wake of a Houston man's death on Friday.
The ACLU's call for a moratorium was spurred, in part, by the death of mental health patient Joel Casey, who died on his 52nd birthday after being shocked by a Taser gun while fighting with Harris County Precinct 1 deputy constables. Casey's exact cause of death has not been determined, but deputies later learned he had a history of heart problems and hepatitis B — issues not disclosed in paperwork sent by a private psychiatric center to the constable's office.
Even so, local law enforcement agencies polled Tuesday say they have no plans and have not heard of any intentions by their command staffs to stop using the Tasers. They say the stun gun has proved to be a valuable tool and consider it a success.
ACLU chapters in Colorado and northern California have sought similar moratoriums. Just last week, a sheriff in Toledo, Ohio, suspended his office's use of Tasers after an inmate who died was shocked with the stun gun many times at a county jail.
Meanwhile, a civil rights activist expressed concern about how often Tasers are used by Houston Police Department officers. Houston police have used Tasers about 140 times since the devices were bought in November — a rate of about one or two instances a day, said HPD Lt. Robert Manzo.
Friday's death and HPD's statistics have ignited a long-simmering debate about whether Tasers are safe and whether police use them too liberally.
Casey's death Friday marked the first time in Houston a person has become unresponsive and died after being shocked by a Taser. Deputies would not have used a Taser on Casey had they known of his heart problems, Precinct 1 Chief Deputy J.C. Mosier said.
Paperwork from the private psychiatric and drug treatment program DAPA did not indicate Casey had health problems or communicable diseases, Mosier said. The acronym "NA" — not applicable — was listed in both categories, he said.
"I'm not necessarily blaming them. It's just we didn't have all the information we needed. Who's responsible for that, I don't know," Mosier said.
DAPA, in the 6200 block of Westpark, did not return calls seeking comment Tuesday.
Man shocked 3 times
Casey was shocked by a Taser three times during the fight in the 4100 block of Meyerwood, but the device seemed to have no effect, according to the deputies' statements. One deputy wrote that the jolt seemed to make Casey "rage uncontrollably," Mosier said.
Casey was zapped once in the upper chest , but he continued fighting with the deputies, reports show. After a second jolt, Casey knocked the Taser out of a deputy's hand. The Taser was then used a third time.
After being handcuffed and put in the back seat of a patrol car, Casey tried to kick out the windows, Mosier said. Deputies then removed him from the car, put him on the ground and put leg cuffs on him. When they put him back in the car, they saw he wasn't breathing, Mosier said. Casey died at a hospital.
"I'll tell you something — I don't believe the Taser had anything to do with this," Mosier said of the man's death.
Studies to determine Casey's cause of death were pending Tuesday night, the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office said.
Casey's death is "the quintessential straw that broke the camel's back," said Will Harrell, executive director of the ACLU of Texas.
The organization is seeking a moratorium on the use of Tasers "until we can be assured of adequate training and policies on their use," Harrell said.
"It's clear the police either don't know the power of what they hold in their hands today, or are abusing it."
Local police deny that, saying Tasers have proved their worth and reduce injuries. HPD, the Harris County Sheriff's Department and the Precinct 1 Constable's Office say they have no plans or are not aware of any intentions to put their use of Tasers on hold.
"Our officers are trained only to use the minimum amount of force necessary to bring an individual into compliance," said Manzo.
Using devices too much?
The Sheriff's Office also is satisfied with the Taser, which it calls a valuable tool.
Sheriff's Maj. Mike Smith, who supervises the patrol division said he is "continuously amazed" at the misconception that Tasers were bought only so officers could avoid using their firearms. "It does not necessarily replace the firearm," he said.
But that raises another debate — whether police use Tasers too freely or easily.
One advocate whose son was shot to death by Houston police in 1998 said she fears officers turn to Tasers too frequently and that agencies do not put enough restrictions on them.
"Originally, I thought they would be a good thing and would save lives, but it seems like they are being used when maybe they shouldn't be," said Susan Hartnett, a founder of Civilians Down, a group that monitors police use of force. "To say that someone with mental illness was being difficult seems like an easy way to justify using a Taser when something else, like talking and being calm, may have worked."
Edward Jackson, a spokesman for Amnesty International USA, took particular issue with HPD using the Taser 140 times since November, calling the statistic "cause for alarm."
"It makes absolutely no sense at all ... that police would still be so cavalier in their use of Tasers," said Jackson, a Houston native whose father is a former Houston police officer.
"It's an indication one of two things is going on — either there is a violent crime spree in Houston that is of epidemic proportions that the police are not telling the public about; or they're using Tasers in situations where they would not use batons or pepper spray or guns or any other type of force," Jackson said.
Manzo said HPD's numbers must be taken into proper perspective, considering more than 1,000 of the devices have been distributed among its officers throughout the city.
Reporter Roma Khanna contributed to this report.
peggy.ohare@chron.com
Posted by lois at 06:51 PM | Comments (0)
TX: Interview with Tony Fabelo on why he was silenced by Gov. Rick Perry
Over two decades Fabelo would transform the council into an unbiased source of data and planning for one of the largest prison systems in the world. The council studied everything from prison costs and upkeep to the effectiveness of drug treatment programs. Astoundingly, 1 out of every 20 Texans are under the control of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice either in prison, parole, or on probation. Fabelo created order from chaos. “We must have a criminal justice policy council,” Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire (D-Houston) told The Houston Chronicle upon hearing of Perry’s veto. “It’s critical to the state’s public safety net that we have experts like Dr. Fabelo around.”
Texas Observor 2/18/200
They Shot More than a Messenger
Governer Rick Perry silenced Tony Fabelo. Now, hear what he has to say.
BY JAKE BERNSTEIN
n June 2003, at the end of the regular session of the 78th Legislature, Governor Rick Perry abolished an entire agency with a line-item veto. The agency had a biannual budget of only $2.5 million, but Perry’s action will likely end up costing the state much more than that. For an institution that was unique in the nation, the agency had a rather bland name—the Criminal Justice Policy Council. It had started in 1984 as a council of elected officials tasked with forcing agencies dealing with the criminal justice system to work together. One of its first employees was a freshly minted doctorate from the University of Texas named Tony Fabelo.
Over two decades Fabelo would transform the council into an unbiased source of data and planning for one of the largest prison systems in the world. The council studied everything from prison costs and upkeep to the effectiveness of drug treatment programs. Astoundingly, 1 out of every 20 Texans are under the control of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice either in prison, parole, or on probation. Fabelo created order from chaos. “We must have a criminal justice policy council,” Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire (D-Houston) told The Houston Chronicle upon hearing of Perry’s veto. “It’s critical to the state’s public safety net that we have experts like Dr. Fabelo around.”
Why Perry removed Fabelo is a favorite guessing game of those who work on the advocacy side of the system. The official line from the governor’s office was that the council, created to act “as an independent agency to assist with solutions to prison overcrowding” was superfluous, its demise a money saver. For those who don’t swallow that line, there are at least three different conspiracy theories detailing which hidden interest did in the straight-talking civil servant. Many, aware that a few key players in the lobby run much of the Lege, believe it was Fabelo’s appraisal of privatization—grounded in realism and not ideology. In this theory, it was a corporate deal and Mike Toomey’s fingerprints are all over the axe. Toomey was a lobbyist whose clients included private-prison behemoth Corrections Corporation of America. He helped engineer the 2002-coordinated Republican campaign to seize the Legislature—currently under investigation by a Travis County grand jury. He then became Rick Perry’s chief of staff. (Toomey is back in the lobby for the 79th Legislature: see, “Texas’ First Post-Modern Lobbyist,” TO, December 17, 2004.)
Theory number two had Fabelo done in by faith, so to speak. The council did a study comparing faith-based treatment programs to those offered by the state. It found that, while faith-based programs saved the state money, recidivism rates were about the same. Both approaches failed to keep prisoners engaged or successfully integrate them back into their communities. According to this theory, faith-based Republicans, a key bloc in any Perry primary victory, are responsible for killing the council. Last but not least is the current prison crisis. The Legislative Budget Board, which subsumed many of the council’s responsibilities, says the state prison system could be at capacity by March. Fabelo had predicted as much the session before. A crisis in the prison system is not something to trumpet when running for reelection. The next best thing to solving the problem is minimizing its importance.
None of this need concern Fabelo anymore. His value is clear to officials in five states where he is working as a consultant. He is also helping out in Puerto Rico, his boyhood home. Born in Cuba, Fabelo’s parents spirited their young son off the island after the revolution. They were headed to Spain on a tourist visa, but when the boat stopped in Puerto Rico, his father asked for political asylum. Fabelo laughs as he tells the story from his South Austin home. Throughout the house are touches of the islands. It’s clear in talking to the bearded and perpetually pensive Fabelo that he still cares deeply about Texas and the criminal justice system he spent almost 20 years trying to fine tune. What follows are excerpts from that conversation.
The Texas Observer: There seems to be evidence that other states that didn’t have Texas’ prison building boom also had crime rates that went down. Are we safer or just poorer?
Tony Fabelo: It is a combination of everything. We had such a crisis. We let the system get so out of control in the ’80s. We neglected to have adequate capacity. We neglected to really pay attention to how the war on drugs was having an impact on sentences, or pay attention to the probation infrastructure and so forth. We had such a crisis that we had a gigantic backlog in the county jails. The counties sued the state and won, and we had to pay the counties half a billion dollars over a period of, I think, six years for holding the prisoners in their county jails and for penalties the court decided to impose on the county jails. So at that point, really, there was no choice but to build.
We were in a tremendous bind. There were a lot of releases. The parole rate was 80 percent. When we release at 80 percent, you’re not making good release decisions. So, we released [violent offenders] and they became the poster cases for this situation. So the parole board was shut down, and releases started declining, which aggravated the whole overcrowding. [It] was totally out of whack. So there was no choice given the situation but to build prisons and get the system stable. So in that regard we had to build prisons and we did have an impact on crime, because eventually we had a more stable system where the violent offenders were serving longer.
The other answer to your question is, if we continue to do this, are we just putting more money in this thing, and getting the same returns on the investment? We are getting to the point where we have the highest incarceration rate in the country, the third highest right now. We have about the same prison population as California, [which] has 13 million more people. And that gives you a sense of how high our incarceration rate is. In terms of crime rates, there are other states that saw declines in crime, particularly New York, [which had a] tremendous decline in crime. They did a lot better in terms of crime rate decline even though their incarceration rates did not increase as much.
Right now with the highest incarceration rate in the country, with a projected shortfall in capacity of about 6,000 to 8,000 beds in the next five, six years, there is not enough capacity. If we build more prisons and build 8,000 prison beds, and that would cost a lot of money nowadays, probably over $1 billion, are you going to get dramatic declines in crime? The answer is no. [We] won’t.
TO: What are the other parts of the system that we need to enhance?
TF: The first one is probation. The probation system in Texas is not a very effective system. Half of the probationers that terminate probation terminate because of a revocation. We have about 30,000 absconders at any point in time, from probation. We don’t even know where these guys are. These are felon probationers. The problem with the probation system is that we have very long supervision terms. We have the longest supervision terms in the country. These people stay there for a long time, so that’s why we end up with 250,000 felonies on probation—more than California, and then another 150,000 or so in misdemeanor probation. The caseloads [for probation officers] are 100 to 116 for felony probations. Which means that the probation officer cannot do much with these people, except to figure out if they’re reporting or not.
So we have a system that—if you’re a probationer and you get in trouble, you don’t get a lot of services, you don’t get a lot of attention that can help you get out of trouble. In particular, attention with employment problems, substance abuse problems and so forth. On the other hand, if you’re doing well on probation, you stay on probation forever because you’re paying fees and they generate money for the system. Half of the funding of the system comes from fees paid by probationers. [For every $1 the state invests, probation collects $1.13 in offender fees for supervision, victim restitution, court costs, and fines.] So if you’re doing well, stay on probation for a long time. Thanks for paying for the system! If you’re not doing as well, we slap you in the face a couple of times, don’t give you a lot of attention in terms of good programs and casework supervision, and then all of a sudden we revoke you.
TO: What would the ideal caseload for probation officers look like?
TF: It varies. Some people say seven. But look, we did this in the juvenile system when Bush was here and that was one of the proudest things I did when I was working there with Governor Bush. He came in and said we need to fix our juvenile system. And part of the fix was to increase time for the most violent juvenile offenders. But the other part of the fix was to strengthen probation. So they put more money into juvenile probation. They put in a system of progressive sanctions. [A] staircase system of how kids will move. If you don’t do it good in step one, we’re going to take you to step two. And put programs behind that; and the caseloads went down—right now I think it’s 1 [probation officer] to 26. And they were way up before the reform: 1 to 70 and so forth. By every measure the numbers are now better, even recidivism, the numbers are better. Now, that’s a smaller system. It’s a system of very short terms. If you’re in juvenile probation you don’t stay on forever like adult probation. You stay on for a year, we try to do something with you to make you better, and in that year, we hope that you don’t come back. And that is exactly what happened. So the same logic needs to apply to the adult system. It hasn’t been applied because you will need funding to replace all these fees that you’re not going to have when you cut the probation terms.
But the solution is very clear: First, you need to cut probation terms. We are talking non-violent offenders. We’re not talking about sex offenders. Most of the probationers are non-violent offenders. So you cut the terms, have very strong supervision for the first year. Strong supervision means not only the guy knocking on your door but making sure you go to the counseling that you need and all that jazz. If you survive that first year, we’re going to put you in another year with lower supervision and see if you survive that second year. And if you do, you’re off the hook. You’ve done good. Studies have shown—I’m doing some work in Virginia—79 percent of the violations that lead to revocation occur in the first eight months. So, most of the stuff happens that first year. And you can do another year just to make sure that now they can follow the rules. If you do that, you will cut the numbers of people on probation substantially.
TO: How do we prepare people for re-entry? Is there a good way? Is it something that the state should invest in more?
TF: We sure don’t prepare them by just opening the door and giving them fifty bucks [laughs] “Okay people, take the bus and good luck!”
I mean, we sure don’t. And this is a national initiative [to deal with this problem]. In Connecticut for example, we identify through mapping studies the higher-risk neighborhoods in New Haven and Hartford. We’re working with the Council of State Governments there, which is a national organization that is also looking at criminal justice issues. And we identify million-dollar neighborhoods. These are neighborhoods where you superimpose the criminal justice supervision costs with welfare costs and employment assistance costs and all that. They’re receiving all the state money, okay? But it is being received by different pots [sic] of people that are not well coordinated.
So part of the initiative that just got adopted is to go back to those neighborhoods, working with all the agencies, not only the criminal justice agencies but their mental health, substance abuse agency, and probation agency, and the Department of Corrections, to try to see how to coordinate these services better. Identify the people going to those communities early on. Start the re-entry process in the prison system. Transition them to those communities [where] they [can] get an array of services that might be paid for by different [public and private groups]. But it’s an array of services oriented at trying to make these people succeed in the community. We call it “justice reinvestment.”
So we’re trying that in Connecticut. We’re going to try it in Arizona. We’re going to try it in Kansas. Those are our three sites that we selected for this year. The people there are all gung-ho about it. And they’re very different states. Connecticut is, let’s say, more liberal, although they have a Republican governor. Kansas is conservative. Arizona is very conservative. But they’re looking at this picture and saying, this makes sense. How can we get out of [having] to build prisons and more prisons? In Connecticut I think it was 60, 70 percent of the people coming back to prison were coming back from [the same] neighborhoods, in New Haven and Hartford. So if you do something there, and you’re better at delivering the resources, you can cut criminal justice costs; and, ironically, reinvest the money that would be freed up—in theory—back in those communities to continue to enhance that.
TO: Do you think the nation, or maybe even Texas, is getting close to a prison tipping point where across the ideological spectrum there is an acknowledgement that it’s not working and something has to be done?
TF: Yes. We have reached that in Texas. We have reached that tipping point, I think. Nationwide, you have that conversation where you have Senator Brownback from Kansas, for example, conservative Republican, talking about the need to improve re-entry, and actually being very involved in this issue nationwide along with what you might call more liberal elected officials. President Bush raised the issue of improving re-entry and dealing with this population in the State of the Union address and that has generated lot of interest. Faith-based communities are behind this and, you know, they are very conservative but they’re behind this. They were behind the adoption of the prison rape bill that was just passed in Congress to prevent rapes in prison. There’s a second part to that bill to enhance community capacity to deal with these populations going back.
I think you have an ideological consensus that violent offenders should be locked up for a long time. But I also think you’re getting a development of an ideological consensus about what we do in these communities with these drug offenders that are substance abusers. I don’t think the consensus is clear yet there. There is a lot of debate around mandatory sentences and so forth. But I think there’s a consensus developing. Now you can have that consensus and nothing gets done. So, you need the leadership to forge that consensus into something that gets done—and that is the key.
TO: Is privatization the magic bullet that some people think it is? And if not, why not?
TF: I think privatization has a role in all this, and Texas has led the way on privatization. So it has a role. It depends where, how, and at what cost? So I don’t think it’s a magic bullet. If some people think we can privatize the whole prison system—that is pretty hard to do. It might cost less now but it’s going to cost you a lot more later. My feelings with privatization is that you have to figure out where it fits and how it fits, for what populations, what performance you expect from them, and work that into the contract arrangement. And if it reduces costs, it’s okay. But it has its limits.
There is no magic bullet in any of this. The magic bullet is to have a long-term commitment to improve your probation infrastructure in such a way that you cut terms, improve programs and services, and try to work with judges to make them feel very comfortable that when they put somebody in probation they are more likely to do good and they will have more alternatives to revocation.
I was in Kansas in November and if you get revoked from probation on a technical violation, you basically serve six months in prison, and you get out. You don’t go back with your original sentence. In Texas you go back with your original sentence so you’re going to serve whatever, 50 percent of that, probably now, 40 percent of whatever the sentence was.
[I’m working in] Virginia—a very conservative state. One big difference is they have sentencing guidelines that are administered by the judges. They are working on a risk assessment instrument for probation and community supervision revocation that lets the judges identify where these people fall in terms of risk of coming back again. And if they fall below a certain line, the recommendation is to leave them in the community with alternative programs.
They think they can divert like 40 percent of the people that are being revoked based on this risk assessment. The people that fall in this lower category, only 17 percent were re-arrested after a two-year period compared to 48 percent for the people that fall in the higher risk. So it’s not that you have zero risk, you always have a risk. But you have to identify where these guys fall, in what group, and the judges use it and try to divert people that way.
TO: Well, the governor, when asked about Texas’ lack of capacity, says that we can just outsource to private facilities and county jails. But is that really a cost-effective solution for the state?
TF: Well, it might be cost-effective in the sense that it might cost a little bit less than housing them in the prison system. It might reduce some of the prison construction cost. If some of the privates construct their own prisons, I guess, or the counties pay them for holding them there. But the operational cost will still be large. You still have to pay for housing those people. And at one point, the question becomes, “Where’s the end of this thing? How large is this going to get?” We have 160,000 prisoners. Are we going to do this every four, five years? Buy 6,000 more prisoners? Somebody is going to have to really answer questions. And I have asked that question before. What it requires is a strong commitment to enhance other parts of this system that we have not enhanced very well.
TO: What questions should legislators be asking of the folks at the Legislative Budget Board who are doing some of what you used to do? What information will be missing that legislators should know?
TF: Let me tell you a part that was invisible. What we did a lot was serve as a neutral facilitator among the agencies to agree on what was the problem. Agree on some potential options for the problems. Agree on how we were going to approach this to provide the best information for the Legislature and the governor on what to do next. And then agree on accountability measures that the agencies will participate in to move the agenda forward. That was kind of invisible in the sense that what they tended to see were reports, projections, and so forth. But now that I’m traveling all over the country, ironically, I’m doing this role [in other states]. In this state you have all these agencies and the legislative board types and so forth, you need a mechanism for somebody that is perceived as neutral, coming in and facilitating all this work with the agencies to provide a consistent and cohesive view of what needs to get done and how you ’re going to hold everybody accountable for doing it and have everybody working together. I did a lot of that so, a question that you need to ask somebody is whether, that part, that function, has been done or somebody’s doing it. I honestly do not know. I don’t want to speculate because it sounds pretty self-serving.
TO: In your final years there, did you ever feel— I’m not saying that you gave in to it—but did you ever feel pressured to reach any kind of conclusion?
TF: No. I mean there were a lot of pressures during the last session. But everybody that knew me, knew that I would listen, try to figure out what was reasonable given the base of numbers, of information, and give them my best judgment, and that’s what they always praised me for doing. And any attempts to put pressures that were blatantly political, [they know] I will not do it, and [instead] pay the consequences.
TO: That’s pretty much what happened!
TF: I don’t know, [laughs]. But, that was my job, that’s what they paid me to be. They needed to have somebody that they saw not playing any games with the judgment calls. And many times, Republicans and Democrats—and believe me I have good friends on both sides, very good friends—[would] tell me, “maybe we don’t like what you say sometimes, but we know it’s your judgment call based on the best information that we have. And if we don’t like it, we’re going to tell you and then try to work on it. But that’s what we like, because there’s a lot of people who come here, and you know they have all kinds of agendas.” And so at a certain point they don’t believe anything and this is the problem. It becomes a game of opportunity—using information to create opportunity as opposed to using information to create options that most people think are reasonable [to provide] alternatives to whatever problem they’re facing. It’s fascinating. The use of information in a power structure is something that fascinates me and I love to watch it.
TO: One last question: Why do you think the agency was terminated?
TF: [Laughs]. I just take it as a big compliment what [they] said. We did such a good job in helping the state get out of the crisis in the early ’ 90s, that we were no longer needed! [Laughs]. So we worked ourselves out of a job! The only agency that has done that. And I appreciate the compliment.
Posted by lois at 06:47 PM | Comments (0)
Op-Ed: NY Suffolk County Should Buck States Jail Order
BY MAURICE MITCHELL
February 24, 2005
With the announcement of an almost half-billion dollar price tag, including construction and debt, Suffolk County's proposed "Super Jail" is an economic and social disaster waiting to happen.
The disclosure of this exorbitant budget marks a snag in the fast tracking of the county's largest construction project ever. With minimal public input, Suffolk has embarked on a journey all too common for localities both statewide and nationally. Given the stakes, Suffolk legislators and the county executive have an opportunity to demonstrate leadership by standing up to state mandates and rethinking the project.
Overcrowded jails and the larger, more expensive jails that replace them are symptoms of a failing criminal-justice system that needs to be re-examined. Although statistics show that incarceration is the most ineffective, expensive, inhumane feature of the criminal-justice system, it is constantly being expanded and over-funded. With almost 5 percent of the world's population and a quarter of the world's prisoners, the United States has eclipsed both China and Russia in its rate of incarceration.
The national average of inmates who return to jail is 70 percent. Furthermore, studies like those recently done through the American Bar Association confirm what members of the black and Latino communities have long maintained - prison and jail unduly and disproportionately affect communities of color. Considering these realities, incarceration is perhaps the only public project given unlimited resources despite decades of consistently horrible performance.
Crime rates and the prison population have been dropping in the past decade, but during this period an alarming trend has developed on the county level. Showing a stark disconnect from reality, the state has mandated jail expansion in 36 counties since 1995. Suffolk's proposed 1,280-bed facility is by far the largest jail the state has mandated in recent memory. The planned facility has truly earned the title "Super Jail," with approximately three times the cells of the next largest proposed jail in Dutchess County.
Though counties like Suffolk have genuine issues with overcrowding, the State Commission of Corrections displayed unprecedented authority by not only identifying the problem but also ordering the solution. In December of 2002 the Commission of Corrections dictated that Suffolk build a 1,200-bed jail facility by 2007 to remedy overcrowding. This mandate was issued with no basis in facts or research, and created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Today, after hundreds of thousands of dollars in research, consulting, and planning, the proposed facility looks exactly like the state's original prescription.
Such state micromanagement stymies innovative reforms like those recently applied in Macomb County, Mich., where nonviolent mentally ill inmates are removed from jail and given specific treatment. Other examples of non-construction solutions to jail overcrowding include the full-system overhaul conducted in Monroe County, N.Y. Officials in Monroe implemented balanced reforms from arrest to sentencing that alleviated jail overcrowding while preserving public safety. The sentencing of those caught driving with suspended licenses to community service, rather than jail, is another sensible reform.
Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy and local legislators have a duty to be responsive to their constituents, not the Commission of Corrections. This Albany-based board of unelected appointees may be over-reaching its mandate in the first place. Dutchess County Executive William R. Steinhaus recently vetoed his legislature's efforts to fund a mandated jail. Alternatively, Suffolk County should follow the lead of Tompkins County, which in early December dropped construction plans altogether in defiance of the Commission of Corrections. Although its project is dwarfed by Suffolk's, Tompkins officials set a precedent, proving that the Commission of Corrections' directives are not sacrosanct.
If Suffolk legislators continue to ignore pleas from their constituents, we only need to visit our neighbors upstate in Ulster County to see the future. Ulster capitulated to the state's mandates and is managing a partially completed facility that is millions of dollars over budget and a year off schedule.
It is incumbent on county government to act decisively and defiantly against state mandates through aggressive and innovative responses to jail overcrowding. Suffolk officials should work with other counties to promote local solutions over state meddling. If the county executive and legislature do not seize this opportunity, they will also be to blame.
Copyright (c) 2005, Newsday, Inc.
This article originally appeared at: http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vpmit244155865feb24,0,1937273.story?c
oll=ny-viewpoints-headlines
Posted by lois at 06:44 PM | Comments (0)
Talk in MA about transition from prison to community
"In bid to battle crime, Massachusetts and other states promise help with everything from housing to rehab, as inmates rejoin society."
February 23, 2005 Christian Science Monitor
A shift to easing life after prison
By Sara B. Miller | Staff writer of The Christian
Science Monitor
BOSTON - In an effort to reduce troubling rates of crime by former inmates, states are increasingly focusing attention on a crucial period of opportunity and risk - supporting offenders as they reenter life outside prison. Massachusetts is the latest case in point, with leaders proposing that all felons be supported by supervision as they transition back into the state's towns and cities. It joins a number of cities, and states from Rhode Island to Ohio, focusing on this reentry phase at a time when hundreds of thousands of prisoners, many netted during the crack wars of the 1980s, are returning to society each year. According to national statistics, two-thirds of state prison inmates are rearrested within three years of their release. Now, even in crime-tough California, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is emphasizing education, job training, and drug rehabilitation for prisoners in the state's $6.5 billion correctional system. While reentry programs are proliferating at the state level, the idea has also taken hold in Washington. President Bush spoke of a need for reentry programs in his State of the Union address in 2004. Rep. Rob Portman (R) of Ohio and Rep. Danny Davis (D) of Illinois will soon reintroduce legislation that would, among other things, establish a national resource center of best practices. Driven by prison demographics and tight state budgets, the popularity of reentry programs also reflects a shift in the public mind-set. Though the efficacy of such programs is controversial, experts agree that much of the "tough on crime" rhetoric of the 1980s has given way - in both parties - to a belief that transitional assistance is a cost-savings proposition and a matter of public safety. Prisoners aren't put away forever, points out Amy Solomon, an expert in corrections and prisoners at the Urban Institute. "Traditionally the idea of rehabilitation is a Democratic idea.... Shifting the focus to public safety, and to doing things smarter, has allowed for both Republicans and Democrats to have this conversation." The Massachusetts legislation would pair each inmate with a case manager who would help develop a plan to find work, housing, and alcohol and drug counseling. The mandatory supervision would last at least nine months and often much longer - one-quarter of the prisoners' maximum sentences. A judge could change its duration. Currently 40 percent of prisoners in Massachusetts are not supervised at all after their release, roughly twice the national average. Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey (R), who is leading the effort, said last week that it costs $43,000 to keep one person in prison, so the state could save $1 million for every one percent of recidivism deterred. According to a study in 2002 by the Massachusetts Sentencing Commission, 49 percent of state prisoners reoffend within a year of their release. Rep. Michael Festa, a Democrat from Melrose, calls the cost and frequency of recidivism a "prescription for disaster." Other statistics lie behind the national movement, too. Over 600,000 prisoners are released each year from the nation's correctional facilities, and the recidivism rate - two-thirds - has remained stable for 30 years. With 2 million people behind bars and tight budgets making it impossible to keep building prisons, "more and more communities are realizing it's in their best interest to shepherd this transition so that communities can be safe," says Peggy Burke, a principal at the Center for Effective Public Policy, a Maryland think tank. At play as well is a gradual realization, experts say, that community-based organizations, not prisons, have the best chance of rehabilitating prisoners. "There has been recognition that prison time alone doesn't help people change behavior in the long run," says Alex Holsinger, an associate professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. This recognition isn't new, but notions of rehabilitation and assisting reentry fell out of favor in the 1980s when cries for mandatory minimum sentences and tougher punishment funneled funds toward incarceration. Ms. Solomon says that some of the renewed Republican interest in reentry has occurred because it enables faith-based groups, many of which already work with the prison population, to come forward. Even today, not all lawmakers or researchers favor spending on reentry, and there's still plenty of "tough on crime" sentiment. Some also feel that while the reentry movement is a nice ideal, it is less effective in reality. James Austin, president of the JFA Institute in Washington, a research center on justice and corrections, says that current programs don't serve enough people, that corrections should rely more on community services, and that there is little data to measure whether the programs are working. "There's been a lot of talk," he says, "but it still needs to be implemented properly." Indeed, most programs are still limited in scope. That's one reason that Frederica Williams, executive director of the Whittier Street Health Center in Roxbury, a Boston neighborhood, started a voluntary post-prison release collaborative for outgoing inmates in 2003. "There was a huge gap once they were released back to the community," she says. "They went back to the life that they knew." Solomon says that the holistic approach in Massachusetts could help fill that gap and even become a national model. "If it is implemented as it is envisioned, it would put Massachusetts at the forefront," she says. "A lot of states are innovating on the margins." The idea has garnered local support. While Mr. Festa hopes to see a more comprehensive approach, he believes the reentry proposal is an important first step. Meanwhile, the police superintendent in Lowell, Mass., who established a voluntary reentry program some five years ago, says the new legislation will bolster a program that, even in limited form, has succeeded. "We've done the best we can under the current law and with no funding," says Edward Davis, superintendent of the Lowell Police Department. "The steps [the Romney administration] have taken would remove that roadblock."
Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links
Posted by lois at 06:38 PM | Comments (0)
Supreme Court Rejects Segregation in CA Prisons
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-scotus24feb24,0,4590196.story?coll=la-home-nation
THE NATION
Justices Reject Segregation in State's Prisons
The Supreme Court says California's policy of separating incoming inmates by race, meant to curb violence, is constitutionally shaky.
By David G. Savage and Jenifer Warren
Times Staff Writers
February 24, 2005
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday all but overturned California's policy of housing new prison inmates by race, declaring that the temporary segregation must be halted unless state officials could show it was the only way to maintain safety and security.
In a 5-3 decision, the court said the largest state prison system in the nation was dangerously close to violating the Constitution's ban on racial segregation by the government.
"We rejected the notion that separate can ever be equal … 50 years ago in Brown vs. Board of Education, and we refuse to resurrect it today," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said for the court.
However, she left open the option for prison officials to segregate gang members or violent individuals from other inmates.
The ruling cast doubt on a 25-year unwritten California prison policy — said to be the only one of its kind in the nation — of separating incoming prisoners by race during a screening period that lasts as long as 60 days.
At seven "reception centers," new inmates and those being transferred to another facility are kept in a cell with an inmate of the same race or national heritage. Outside of their cells — at mealtimes, on jobs and in the recreation areas — prisoners mix without regard to race.
"You cannot house a Japanese inmate with a Chinese inmate. They will kill each other," an associate warden testified in a passage cited by the court. "The same with Laotians, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Filipinos."
Margot Bach, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections in Sacramento, said prison officials sometimes separated inmates of the same race or ethnicity.
"Southern California Hispanics and Northern California Hispanics don't get along, and you can't put them in a cell together," she said.
Another high-level state corrections official greeted the decision with alarm, saying that abandoning race-based housing would be "catastrophic and extremely dangerous."
"The only way the system has maintained any sense of control has been through our segregation policies," said the official, who asked not to be named for reasons of job security. "The fact is that inmates, when they are institutionalized, have their own moral standards, their own culture, and they just don't tolerate mixing of races."
Officials in other states, such as Texas, said that they separated new inmates for a few days; prison experts said California was the only state that relied on race for screening over weeks or months.
The policy drew little attention until it was challenged by a prisoner. Garrison S. Johnson, a black inmate from Los Angeles County, filed a lawsuit 10 years ago, contending the state's segregation policy was unconstitutional.
In 1987, he was sent to prison for 36 years for murder, robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. He was transferred to several prisons, and each time he was put in a cell with a black inmate.
Los Angeles lawyer Bert H. Deixler took up Johnson's case and, despite a series of setbacks in the courts in California, succeeded in getting the attention of the Supreme Court.
"The impact of this decision will be to end the disgraceful practice of racial segregation in the California prisons," Deixler said. "You can look at gang membership as a basis for special treatment, but you can't look at people coming off the bus and say: 'Blacks go through that door and whites go through the other door.' This policy assumes if you are of a certain race, you have a penchant for interracial violence."
Bush administration lawyers joined the case on Johnson's side when it reached the high court. They argued that the segregation policy was unneeded and unconstitutional. Moreover, they said, the federal prison system prohibited racial discrimination among inmates.
"I'm elated," said Johnson, who is incarcerated at Corcoran State Prison near Fresno. "It's still sinking in."
The 40-year-old inmate learned of the court's decision during a telephone call from state Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), head of an oversight committee on corrections. During the call, which the Los Angeles Times was allowed to monitor, Johnson said he was raised a "military brat" and lived mostly among whites as a youth. It was not until he arrived in prison, Johnson said, that he experienced racial discrimination.
Critics of the state's $6.5-billion prison system praised Wednesday's decision. Romero called on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger "to move with all deliberate speed to integrate our prisons once and for all."
But California prison officials said they were not ready to abandon the policy.
"This wasn't a clear-cut decision from the Supreme Court," Bach said. "Our legal affairs people are looking at the decision and are determining the next steps."
The case, Johnson vs. California, tested two long-standing doctrines of the Supreme Court.
One says that official racial segregation is forbidden, a violation of the Constitution's guarantee of "equal protection" under the law. However, some court opinions have noted that in an extreme case — such as a race riot at a prison — officials may separate people by race.
The second doctrine says judges should defer to prison managers. Inmates do not have the same rights as others, the court has said.
In Johnson's case, the often liberal-leaning U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco applied the second doctrine and said the California prison system's temporary segregation policy was a reasonable means of preventing violence.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court's majority relied on the first doctrine to say that racial segregation can rarely, if ever, be upheld. The justices set aside the 9th Circuit's ruling and sent the case back to California to be reconsidered under the court's doctrine that frowned upon racial segregation by the government.
Johnson's lawyer said he was confident his lawsuit would prevail.
"It's clear to me there is no way this policy can survive strict scrutiny," Deixler said. "I am hopeful Gov. Schwarzenegger will change the policy and not wait for any further hearings."
Lawyers who monitor conditions inside California prisons predicted the segregation policy would not withstand further scrutiny when returned to the 9th Circuit.
"I don't believe the prison officials will be able to show there is a compelling state interest in celling people according to race," said Steve Fama, a lawyer with the nonprofit Prison Law Office in Marin County.
Only Justice Anthony M. Kennedy agreed fully with O'Connor's opinion. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer agreed with the outcome but repeated their view that not all racial classifications — affirmative action policies, for example — were questionable as discrimination.
Justice John Paul Stevens dissented, saying he would have struck down California's policy. "Given the inherent indignity of segregation and its shameful historical connotations," California should have used racial separation "only as a last resort," Stevens said.
Officials could justifiably separate inmates based on their gang affiliations, he said, noting the current policy could result in housing together blacks who were members of rival gangs such as the Bloods and the Crips.
In a separate dissent, Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia said they would have deferred to the judgment of state prison officials.
Against "this backdrop of pervasive racial violence," prison officials acted reasonably in separating new inmates, Thomas said. "The majority is concerned with sparing inmates the indignity and stigma of racial discrimination. California is concerned with safety and saving their lives," said Thomas, arguing that the state had the stronger claim.
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, ill with cancer, took no part in the decision.
California's prison system houses about 164,000 inmates. The disputed policy concerns new arrivals. In 2003, its seven reception centers took in 40,000 new male inmates and 72,000 others who were returned for parole violations.
In its opinion, the Supreme Court said it knew of no other prison segregation policy that matched California's.
During the oral argument in the case, a state lawyer said Texas and Oklahoma had a similar policy, but state officials there disputed the claim.
Mike Viesca, director of public information for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said new inmates were separated by race for a few days.
In a friend-of-the-court brief, state prison officials from Wisconsin, Georgia, Kansas, Alaska and Washington said they believed segregation was counterproductive and could increase racial violence rather than prevent it.
Some California correctional officers echoed that sentiment and warned of turbulence ahead.
Lt. Charles Hughes, an 11-year veteran at the state prison in Lancaster, said he welcomed the court's decision, arguing that California's practice of housing by skin color could have had the unintended effect of inflaming racial tensions.
But Hughes said integration would work only if it was carried out slowly and carefully.
"If they force integration immediately," he said, "it's going to be very violent."
*
Savage reported from Washington and Warren from Sacramento. Times staff writer Richard Fausset in Los Angeles and researcher Lianne Hart in Houston contributed to this report.
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
Posted by craig at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2005
TN: New Jail for Women---"progress" a jail of their own
"Clutching a stuffed bunny rabbit to her chest, Asia Wade knows that
change can be as scary as it is liberating. She and roughly 400 other
women are preparing to move into Davidson County's first females-only
jail early next month.
Facility will be a first in Davidson
By IAN DEMSKY, Staff Writer
Wednesday, 02/23/05
Wade, 25, is not quite getting a room of her own, but it will be nice to have a door on the shower and to sleep without 50 others breathing all around her in the night.
Being a woman in a jail built for men means she can't work in many of
the jail assignments or move freely through the hallways when male
inmates are present.
''I feel like we aren't getting as much recognition as we should or
getting as much freedom in jail as we should,'' Wade said in an
interview yesterday at the Metro Detention Center.
The opening of the women's facility, shaped like twin butterflies,
should help alleviate long-standing overcrowding issues.
Nearly 1,300 inmates routinely live at the privately run Metro Detention
Facility — a jail designed to hold 892 prisoners. In the past, crowding
has threatened the jail's state certification.
The 500 additional beds at the aptly named ''Correctional Development
Center-Female'' will bring the overcrowded Metro Detention Facility back to its intended capacity.
A grand-opening ceremony is scheduled for this afternoon, but inmates
will not start moving in until the beginning of next month.
In recent years, women have increasingly found themselves behind bars.
The number of women in jails more than doubled between 1990 and 2003,
according to the U.S. Department of Justice statistics.
In 1994, 118 women were jailed in Davidson County at any given time.
Today that number is more than 350.
That changing demographic highlighted the need for a separate facility, sheriff's officials said.
The new women's jail was designed with the specific needs of female
inmates in mind.
''When it comes to detention facilities, women have often played second fiddle to men,'' Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall said yesterday. They're placed in facilities designed for men ''wherever we could find space.''
The new jail at 5113 Harding Place, in the correctional complex behind the Metro Police South Precinct station, features:
• Double-occupancy rooms instead of bunkhouse-style dormitories that add an element of privacy.
• Single-person showers with doors rather than group showers.
• Child-friendly visitation rooms stocked with donated toys to foster
relationships between female inmates and their children.
• One wing of the jail will participate in a ''cell dogs'' program. The women will care for dogs from Metro's Animal Control facility, located just behind the jail. The program, which has been used successfully with male domestic violence prisoners, prepares the animals for adoption while teaching the inmates nurturing skills.
• It can house minimum-, medium- and maximum-security inmates.
The women's jail is part of a larger project that includes a 300-bed
minimum security facility for men that opened in October. It also
includes the addition of up to 380 beds at the Metro Detention Facility, for which $10.2 million has already been earmarked. The project is intended to keep overcrowding in check for the next seven to 10 years, Hall said.
He hopes to fight crowding by offering various educational and
therapeutic programs that will help inmates stay out of jail in the
future.
''It's nice to have a facility that focuses on us and on getting us back into society,'' said Karen Phillips, 39, who will probably be living in the new facility until September. ''It's not like they have a magic cure-all, but they have so many resources available.''
Metro inmate populations
Here are the Metro inmate totals and capacity as of Monday:
Criminal Justice Center — 648 out of 688
Hill Detention Center — 461 out of 474
Correctional Development Center-Male — 457 out of 600
Correctional Development Center-Female — 0 out of 510 (opening in March)
Offender Re-Entry Center — 210 out of 300
Metro Detention Facility — 1261 (including 370 women) for a capacity of
892
Source: Davidson County Sheriff's Office
Cells surround an eating and bathing area at the new Metro women's jail,
Correction Development Center-Female. A grand-opening ceremony is
scheduled for this afternoon, but inmates will not start moving in until
the beginning of next month.
JOHN PARTIPILO / STAFF
http://tennessean.com/growth/archives/05/01/66015069.shtml
Posted by lois at 06:17 PM | Comments (0)
Alabama: Bill introduced to abolish parole board for people with non-violent convictions
"Supporters say the board has finished its job. Inmate advocates say more nonviolent prisoners could safely be paroled."
The Birmingham News Tuesday, February 22, 2005
CARLA CROWDER
News staff writer
Backed by Attorney General Troy King, a bill has been introduced in the Alabama Senate that would abolish the special parole board appointed to help clear nonviolent felons out of the state's beleaguered prisons.
The bill, introduced earlier this month, would end the panel's term in July, 15 months earlier than originally planned.
Supporters say the board has finished its job. Inmate advocates say more nonviolent prisoners could safely be paroled.
Gov. Bob Riley appointed the board during the state's 2003 financial crisis. His plan was to speed up paroles of nonviolent offenders to save the state money and comply with federal court pressure to relieve crowded, dilapidated conditions at several prisons.
The effort led to 2,219 nonviolent offenders getting paroled. The total prison population fell only about 350, though, because of new people coming in. The early paroles did reverse the trend of Alabama's prison population swelling every year.
The month the new board began, there were 27,344 prisoners. A year later, that was down to 27,016.
"It was created because it was our understanding there was a backlog of nonviolent offenders that had a profile, that they would be eligible for parole if the board had time to hear the cases," King said. "They could hear twice as many cases, and ... we'd get people who were not a threat to society back out of the prisons, and get us into compliance with court orders."
However, he said, "Those backlogs no longer exist."
Also, the work of the board has slowed.
"Both boards are not staying busy hearing cases," said Cynthia Dillard, assistant executive director of the board. "We're having to divide a smaller number of cases between two boards."
New board members Jennifer Garrett, Don McGriff, Cliff Walker and Steve McGill earn about $76,000 a year. Efforts to reach the governor's office for comment on the bill failed.
The highest number of paroles since the special board began was 542, last March. It slowed to 101 in October and hasn't reached 200 since.
With the prison population virtually stagnant and prisons at nearly double capacity, Corrections Commissioner Donal Campbell has requested a budget of $578 million next year, about double last year's funding. The request includes $151 million for two new prisons.
Seek more candidates:
Some people who work with parolees suggest that the board should look harder for nonviolent inmates who might do well at home. About 48 percent of Alabama prisoners are locked up for drug or property crimes, according to Department of Corrections statistics.
Hearings have been held for everyone eligible, but new prisoners come in regularly.
"We're talking about 27,000 people, one would think we could find 400 a month," said Chris Retan, director of Aletheia House, a Birmingham rehabilitation center that offers housing and treatment services to parolees.
The board heard the cases of 6,084 prisoners serving time for nonviolent cases. Many of the prisoners denied parole will have another chance in six months or a year.
Retan said one of the reasons the parole board delays releasing people is that there are not enough transition centers where they can live and get back on their feet.
Aletheia House, in a partnership with UAB's Treatment Alternatives to Street Crime program and the Montgomery nonprofit Aid to Inmate Mothers, has been running a re-entry program for women and another for men for about a year. All of the funding comes from the federal government. Most other halfway houses are faith-based, funded through churches or charities.
"There is no local support for re-entry programs, no state money," Retan said. "If there was funding for residential re-entry programs, the board would feel more comfortable releasing more people sooner."
Since the parole board began special hearings for nonviolent prisoners - even before the second board began - 4,174 prisoners have been released. Of those, 11 percent have had their parole revoked, either for new crimes or for a technical violation, such as not paying fines.
The bill to abolish the second board is sponsored by Sen. Steve French, R-Mountain Brook.
E-mail: ccrowder@bhamnews.com
http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/1109067427279530.
xml>
Posted by lois at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)
Alabama: Governor wants to use education money for youth prisons
Feb 21, 2005
New Radio Ads Support Riley's Education Budget
Both sides say they're fighting for Alabama's children. But they have two very different ways of going about it.
Radio ads paid for by the Alabama Republican Party began airing across the state Monday. They support Governor Bob Riley's education budget.
That very same budget is under fire from the state teacher's union, the Alabama Education Association. So who's right?
Every year, the legislature passes two budgets - the education budget, which pays for education, and the general fund budget, which pays for everything else.
This year, the general fund budget is short. So the governor wants to use education money to pay for some general programs. That's where the controversy lies.
The radio ads slam the Alabama Education Association and it's leader, Paul Hubbert.
"If Paul Hubbert cared as much about children as they claim, they'd be thrilled with Riley's budget," the ad states.
Hubbert says he's used to the criticism. He says he's been a target for years. But that doesn't mean he'll stop his fight. "We're certainly not going to let him (Riley) beat up on us," he says. "We're going to tell people the truth."
Hubbert says the governor's plan would use education money to pay for things like youth prisons, children's health insurance, even milk inspectors.
"If we start doing that, we're basically diverting money from the trust that was set up 30 or 40 years ago by the people to fund schools," Hubbert explains.
The GOP's Twinkle Cavanaugh says the governor's budget puts more money in the classroom than ever before. Her party's radio ads encourage voters to call their lawmakers and urge them to pass it.
"What we're trying to do is communicate Bob Riley's message that he has put together a fiscally responsible budget that puts record amounts of money into the classrooms that doesn't raise taxes on Alabamians," Cavanaugh says.
Republicans say Hubbert is opposed to Riley's budget because it only includes a 4% pay raise for teachers and Hubbert is looking out for teachers' best interests. Hubbert says it's not about teacher salaries, but about keeping the education trust fund in tact.
The radio ads will air for one week. But the fight will last much longer. Neither the education budget nor the general fund budget has made it out of committee yet. The legislative session ends May 16th.
http://www.wsfa.com/Global/story.asp?S=2979242&nav=0RdEWeIc
Posted by lois at 06:09 PM | Comments (0)
'Inmates Gladly Take on Jobs for Low or No Pay" !
"States benefit plenty in the pocketbook. A spokesman for Alabama¹s corrections department estimated its work program saves the state about $12 million a year. Mississippi reported that offenders provided almost $20 million worth of free labor in fiscal 2003. California¹s conservation program annually provides 10 million hours of conservation and firefighting work, saving the state $80 million a year, a spokesman said."
Wednesday, February 9, 2005
Inmates gladly take on odd jobs for low or no pay
By Pauline Vu , Special to Stateline.org
Gone are the days of the chain gang. Today, states are finding more creative uses for felons, from saving retired thoroughbreds in Kentucky to growing poinsettias for state buildings in Iowa to fighting mudslides in California. Prison work programs help local communities, save states millions, and give inmates who are mostly nonviolent offenders something worthwhile to do.
From Oregon¹s Bland Mountain to Georgia¹s Walker County, at least 14 states have inmate crews to fight wildfires. One of the country¹s largest programs is in California, where 4,200 volunteer inmates none convicted of arson live at 40 conservation camps.
The inmates male and female don¹t just battle fires but also help out at other disasters. Recently, orange-clad inmates searched for survivors when a mudslide destroyed homes in the California city of La Conchita in January. Inmates also figured prominently in battling the Southern California fires in late 2003.
Later this month Arizona will become the second state to train female inmates to fight fires. In her State of the State address last month, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano announced that her budget would include funding for more prison wildfire crews.
Another common prison program is dog training, now being tried in at least half the states. Convicts at the Tennessee Prison for Women train dogs to make them more adoptable and spare them from being euthanized. In Missouri, inmates at a women¹s prison train service dogs for the disabled, while in Alaska, inmates care for dogs that can¹t finish the grueling Iditarod sled race until their owners return.
Felons also help out at state government buildings. Iowa inmates got the Capitol ready for the legislative session and prepared the governor¹s mansion for the celebration of Iowa¹s new commemorative quarter last September. Volunteers from the South Dakota Women¹s Prison clean and garden at the State Capitol, while South Carolina¹s Code of Law requires the corrections chief to ³furnish such convict labor as [the keeper of the State House] may need to keep the State House and Grounds in good order.²
According to Joe Weedon, the director of governmental affairs for the American Correctional Association, some states have expanded their work programs in the past five years as the corrections community increasingly discussed how to help inmates adjust to life after prison.
Georgia is one of those states. More inmate work crews have been sent out as more counties have requested help, corrections department spokeswoman Sheree Lipscomb said.
³We¹re always trying to do something to get them better prepared to leave prison,² she said. ³If they learn a skill or trade, what better way to make them a better person when they leave?²
Corrections officials say the volunteer work benefits both inmates and communities.
For example, inmates from three Iowa prisons dismantled a greenhouse for a local church, free of charge, said Lettie Prell, the assistant to the Iowa corrections director. They used the salvaged material to build greenhouses at the prisons, one of which later grew 400 poinsettia plants for government offices around the state during the holidays.
Some work programs cater to a state¹s needs. In Florida, inmates at the Broward County Jail help endangered sea turtles by replacing potentially contaminated sand at their hatcheries. In Alabama, inmate work crews cleaned up after Hurricane Ivan last year. In the home state of the Kentucky Derby, inmates at Blackburn Correctional Complex take care of retired racehorses that otherwise would head to the slaughterhouse.
Prisons also work closely with charities. In at least 32 states, prisons have partnered with local Habitat for Humanity affiliates and put wards to work building cabinets, walls and sometimes homes for the needy. At North Carolina¹s Gates Correctional Center, inmates refurbish broken and battered bikes for needy children as part of the Bicycle Ministry.
These work programs differ from prison industry programs, in which inmates produce services or make products such as license plates and furniture to sell. Those inmates make a higher wage, and their work is done within the prison.
Eligibility for work programs differs from prison to prison, but those accepted are usually minimum security inmates. Wardens consider factors such as good behavior, time remaining on an inmate¹s sentence, and nature of the crime.
Compensation also varies. Georgia and South Carolina don¹t pay their inmates, while Oregon¹s fire crews earn $3 to $4 a day. Meanwhile, Kansas and Indiana pay inmates about $1 a day for community work. California inmates, who make $1 an hour while fighting fire and $1.45 a day for other conservation work, also can deduct two days off their sentence for every day worked in the camps.
States benefit plenty in the pocketbook. A spokesman for Alabama¹s corrections department estimated its work program saves the state about $12 million a year. Mississippi reported that offenders provided almost $20 million worth of free labor in fiscal 2003. California¹s conservation program annually provides 10 million hours of conservation and firefighting work, saving the state $80 million a year, a spokesman said.
But prison work programs aren¹t perfect. In 2001, then-Gov. Jim Hodges fired South Carolina¹s prisons director and scrapped the prisoner-staffed maintenance and housekeeping program at the governor¹s mansion when it was revealed that inmates had sex there. Inmates no longer work inside the mansion.
Prisoners also have escaped while out on work crews.
³There¹s always that risk, but they¹re under supervision,² said Darwin Weeldreyer, the director of community service for South Dakota¹s corrections department. He pointed out that most inmates on community work crews are nonviolent offenders. ³We found in South Dakota it¹s a great benefit to keep inmates busy. Š We haven¹t run into any situation where the walkaway has had such an effect that someone¹s requested the [work] program be done away with.²
Talks with prison officials reveal several success stories: Kentucky inmates who are so good with horses that race trainers later hire them; the wheelchair-bound Pennsylvania man who came to a prison to thank the staff for training his Labrador; the Iowa town so grateful for inmates¹ help after a tornado that its residents invited inmates to a potluck.
It¹s often seen as a privilege to be accepted for a work crew. ³They get to be outside, they enjoy it, and among their peers they feel sort of in an exulted position because it is a real big deal for a person to work,² said Mary Leftridge Byrd, Pennsylvania corrections¹ deputy secretary for specialized facilities and programs. ³There are no specific perks other than what happens as a result of a good workday.²
Send your comments on this story to letters@stateline.org. Selected reader feedback will be posted in our Letters to the editor section. Contact Pauline Vu at pvu@stateline.org
http://www.stateline.org/stateline/?pa=story&sa=showStoryInfo&id=430631
Posted by lois at 06:08 PM | Comments (0)
February 22, 2005
$340,000 per cell at new jail in Suffolk Co NY
Yaphank New jail costs explode
Suffolk officials alarmed at projected 55% hike to $286M
BY ZACHARY R. DOWDY AND EMI ENDO
STAFF WRITERS
Suffolk officials reacted with shock yesterday after planning consultants pumped up the projected construction costs for the proposed county jail in Yaphank by 55 percent to $286 million.
The 1,280-cell facility -- which the planners said had to be made 45 percent bigger -- would now cost Suffolk taxpayers $148.6 million to finance over 25 years beginning after a 2006 groundbreaking.
Yesterday's revelation -- which would drive the total cost to nearly $340,000 per cell -- alarmed county lawmakers and agency heads. They immediately huddled at a Correctional Facility Review and Oversight Committee brainstorming session in Hauppauge to begin the process of coming up with cost savings to rein in the venture, which has become the most expensive construction project in the history of the county.
Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy's chief counsel, Kevin Law, expressed shock and concern at the soaring cost and implored the officials to come up with savings to salvage the project. "We signed on for a plan for a reasonable correctional facility," Law said, not one that would "blow the taxpayer out of the water."
Ardent jail plan critic Legis. David Bishop (D-West Babylon) said "this project is either going to bankrupt the county or its taxpayers."
Last spring, Suffolk lawmakers approved borrowing $185 million for construction, shaving off $25 million from Levy's original proposal. The new jail, which would be located at the site of an existing county minimum security facility just south of Long Island Expressway Exit 67, would become the county's main corrections facility, replacing the crowded and outmoded Riverhead jail.
But yesterday, county planning consultants from Hauppauge-based Wiedersum Group and Lafayette, Colo.-based Voorhis Associates, Inc. raised the projected cost by $101 million, or 55 percent, to $286 million, while increasing the planned size of the 1,280-cell facility by 45 percent.
What's more, they projected that the facility would cost about $20 million a year in interest and principal, which would reach $435 million by 2030 if the jail is constructed and completed on time.The new estimates released yesterday do not include annual operational costs, which the Budget Review Office had earlier estimated at $50 million. The $434.6 million total cost for building and financing the jail translates into a per-cell cost of $339,531.
During the briefing with officials, the planners said they increased the projected cost due to myriad factors including the transfer of Sheriff's Department operations from Riverhead. They also said prior projections underestimated the size of recreational space and inmate holding facilities. Public Works Committee Chairman Legis. Allan Binder (R-Huntington) feared even higher costs. "While this is a big number, it could even go up," Binder said.
Lawmakers have wrestled with a new jail since 2003, when the state Commission of Correction warned against overcrowding at Suffolk's existing Riverhead and Yaphank facilities. The commission had allowed the county "variances" to house the overflow inmates in recreation and common areas until a new jail or alternatives were established. But later the commission declined variances and Suffolk was forced to begin housing inmates at upstate jails at a rate of $85 per day per inmate, or $22 million annually.
According to an aggressive schedule laid out by the state Commission of Correction, Suffolk County must complete design plans and specifications by the end of this year and put out to bid the construction of the first phase and its 680 cells by Feb. 1 of next year.
The county must break ground on the new facility by July 1 of next year or face the threat of losing the variances that allow them to house extra inmates. Levy is expected to submit his proposed capital budget for 2006 and three-year capital program for 2006-08 to legislators by April 15.
Activists who have been opposing the jail outright were even more outraged, saying county leaders have not explored enough alternatives to incarceration.
"That could be close to half-a-billion dollars in debt," said Maurice Mitchell, lead organizer of the Long Island Progressive Coalition, referring to the debt service on the jail. "It speaks clearly that we need alternatives that will be cheaper and more effective than incarceration."
Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.
Posted by lois at 04:00 PM | Comments (0)
Focus on meth labs alone won't solve the problems
"Eighty-percent of the meth in Minnesota comes ready-made from large criminal organizations, not from makeshift meth labs. Law enforcement agencies have told me this for years, but surprisingly, this fact was nowhere to be found at the hearing.
I repeat: 80 percent of meth in Minnesota comes from big crime, not little labs. So even if these proposed restrictions on ephedrine retail sales eliminated all makeshift meth labs, there is still plenty of meth to go around. And who's to say organized crime wouldn't up its supply to fill the gap?"
OP ED
Sun, Feb. 20, 2005
Focus on meth labs alone won't solve the problems
CAROL L. FALKOWSKI
I know a lot about drug abuse, but a politician I'm not, which explains my surprise as I listened to the Minnesota Senate Judiciary Committee receive testimony last week about a proposal to restrict access to over-the-counter cold products that contain ephedrine and pseudo-ephedrine. I'm not saying it is a bad idea.
My trouble is not about what was said, but rather about what was left unsaid at the hearing.
The committee heard how meth is made with ephedrine and pseudoephedrine products that are purchased or stolen from pharmacies or grocery stores and how this endangers people living nearby or under the same roof, including children. We saw the horrific slides and heard the tragic stories.
We heard how these small-time clandestine meth labs contaminate surrounding buildings, groundwater, land and air. We heard how costly lab clean-up exacts a toll on the economic and social fabric of rural life, and how law enforcement and correctional institutions strain to keep up.
We heard how meth addicts do almost anything to obtain their drug, including deviant, dangerous and hurtful behaviors that they may have never considered before their addiction ‹ violent crimes and unimaginable acts. Meth addicts pose a unique threat to the public safety.
The committee learned about Oklahoma, where the number of meth labs fell by 78 percent after the state adopted legislation similar to what Minnesota is considering. Life is safer there now. They "stopped the drug before it was made."
What was not said at the hearing:
This is why restricting ephedrine sales is only part of the solution. How big a part? Decide for yourself.
The sole meth addict who testified said meth "made me feel like Superman." With an endorsement like that, it is hard to imagine this drug will disappear.
Also strangely absent was a discussion of increased law enforcement. Assuming meth abuse will continue, we still need more law enforcement to attend to associated crime, even if officers' time is freed up with no more meth labs to bust.
And treatment? It was mentioned mostly in the context of "not working" for meth addicts. The false but widespread belief that "treatment for meth addicts doesn't work" is alive and well.
For those of us in the addiction field, this statement is sadly reminiscent of what people said about crack addicts in the 1980s, or about alcoholics during Prohibition. Yet, it is simply not the case.
A more accurate assessment: Treatment is not as accessible as it should be, especially for meth addicts, most of whom have lost their jobs, assets, homes, families and their health. With meth addicts, an adequate length of treatment is necessary in order to determine which psychiatric disorders are pre-existing and which are associated with meth use. Multiple treatment episodes are not uncommon.
We need treatment in our communities and prisons followed by supported, transitional, sober housing. We need to ensure when we imprison meth addicts that we don't let them out until they've completed treatment.
Addiction, after all, is what drives this epidemic, not the 20 percent of the total meth supply that comes from meth labs.
We must address the disease, not just meth labs, if we are to advance at all. We must look beyond the corner drug store and accept that we cannot arrest our way out of this problem without arresting the disease that underlies it.
Again, I don't know about politics, but I do know a lot about drug abuse. I know we need a comprehensive, well-informed approach with adequate resources for addiction treatment and additional law enforcement, and precursor limitations. Only then can we make a lasting dent in our growing meth problem.
Considering that every dollar spent on treatment saves up to $12 in averted health, social and criminal justice costs, it seems worth the investment.
--
Falkowski is director of research communications at the Hazelden Foundation. She has monitored drug abuse trends in Minnesota for nearly 20 years as part of an on-going epidemiological drug abuse surveillance network of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/editorial/10937652.htm
Posted by lois at 03:52 PM | Comments (0)
Census Miscounts Prisoners, Dilutes Urban Voting Power
Dear Colleague,
Welcome to this week's PrisonersoftheCensus-News, bringing you news of new research, analysis and opinion about the impact of the U.S. Census counting incarcerated people as residents not of their homes but of the prison towns. This week's column is an article I wrote for the February issue of the Coalition for Prisoners Rights Newsletter.
* * *
CENSUS MISCOUNTS PRISONERS, DILUTES URBAN VOTING POWER
[URL: http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/news/fact-21-2-2005.shtml ]
Back in 2000, the Census Bureau counted prisoners as if they actually lived in the town that contains the prison. According to recently published analysis, this administrative quirk reduced the population of the communities where most prisoners come from and swelled the
population of the rural communities that host prisons. Each decade,
census population data is used to draw legislative districts, so prisoners makes prison towns seem more populous -- and therefore receive more political clout -- than their population should have warranted.
Making matters worse, all states but Maine and Vermont bar state prisoners from voting, so prisoners are unable to influence the often pro-prison-expansion legislators whose clout they enhance. At the same time, the urban legislators who so frequently favor proven alternatives to incarceration such as drug treatment see their population and political clout diminished.
According to my series of "Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout" reports, most state constitutions declare that incarceration does not change an individual¹s residence. A prisoner's residence remains the place that he or she lived prior to incarceration. At the same time, all states currently rely on federal census data for their redistricting process. Districts are redrawn each decade so that each district contains the same number of people living there. Having equal numbers of people in each legislative district ensures that each person in that district has equal access to government. This concept is known as the "One Person One Vote" rule, but it breaks down when the U.S. Census data does not reflect where the actual population of the state resides.
Alongside the quadrupling of the incarceration rate in this country has been a growing disparity in where most prisoners come from and where they are incarcerated. According to my first report in New York State, 66% of the state's prison population is from New York City, but 91% of the state's prisoners are incarcerated in the upstate region. The Census method denied New York City credit for 43,740 of its residents and instead credited this population to distant and often politically hostile communities.
Even more critical than this distortion in regional political power is the impact on the political power of Blacks and Latinos in the state compared to Whites. New York State is 62% White, but 82% of the state's prison population and 93% of the drug offenders are Black or Latino. Yet virtually all -- 98% -- of the prison cells are located in state Senate districts that are disproportionately White for the state.
As a result, disenfranchised Black and Latino prisoners from New York City are swelling the population base and political clout of the upstate politicians that are most fervently opposed to ending the unfair and unjust Rockefeller Drug Laws.
The Census counting method creates problems for democracy in
virtually every state. Sixty percent of Illinois' prisoners call
Cook County (Chicago) home, yet 99% of the state's prison cells are outside the county. Los Angeles County supplies 34% of California's prisoners, yet only 3% of the state's prisoners are incarcerated there. Philadelphia is the legal residence for 40% of Pennsylvania's prisoners, but the County contains no state prisons. Wayne County
(Detroit) is home for 20% of Michigan's population. Almost 30% of the state's prisoners are from Wayne County, but only 11% of the state's cells are there.
In Texas, one rural district's population is almost 12% prisoners. Every group of 88 residents in that district are represented in the state House as if they were 100 residents from urban Houston or Dallas. Even states with lower incarceration rates see serious distortions in their democratic processes. In one Montana District, 15% of the population is disenfranchised prisoners from other parts of the state.
When the Supreme Court, in 1963, required state legislative districts to be divided on an equal population basis, it explained its rationale. "[L]egislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests." The principle is that "[T]he weight of a citizen's vote cannot be made to depend on where he lives."
Prisoners are external populations that are not "traditionally" rural in any sense of the word. Allowing communities to take in populations by force, just to benefit at the state legislature, violates any sense of equal protection or fundamental fairness.
When evolving demographics meant more college students studying far from home and more Americans living overseas, the Census policy changed in order to more accurately reflect how many Americans were living where. Today, the growth in the prisoner population requires the Census to update its methodology once again. To be fair and accurate, the Census Bureau needs to start counting prisoners at their home addresses.
* * *
I welcome your feedback on the issue, the website, and this message. And as always, if you prefer to not receive these messages, just let me know.
Best wishes,
Peter Wagner
--
Peter Wagner http://www.PrisonersoftheCensus.org
pwagner@prisonpolicy.org http://www.prisonpolicy.org
Prison Policy Initiative PO Box 127 Northampton, MA 01061
Posted by lois at 03:49 PM | Comments (0)
SCRAM: Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitoring
"The anklets, called SCRAM for ³Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitoring,² measure alcohol intake, body temperature and any attempt to tamper with the device. Sensors in the anklets can detect alcohol processed through sweat and trigger a warning to probation officers that a defendant has strayed."
http://www.sungazette.com/articles.asp?articleID=13741
February 20, 2005 edition of The Sun-Gazette
Alcohol-monitoring units worthy of new commitment
It¹s not surprising Lycoming County adult probation officials want to buy more of the alcohol-monitoring anklets they started using last May. They work.
Of the 63 criminals who have used the anklets, only three consumed alcohol and they were sent to jail for violating terms of their release.
The anklets will be especially valuable in conjunction with the DUI court set to begin March 1. That program is intended to keep drunken drivers out of prison by providing treatment and intense monitoring.
The anklets, called SCRAM for ³Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitoring,² measure alcohol intake, body temperature and any attempt to tamper with the device. Sensors in the anklets can detect alcohol processed through sweat and trigger a warning to probation officers that a defendant has strayed.
It¹s the kind of enforced discipline that helps those imprisoned by alcohol to start climbing out of the dependency without burdening the prison system. In an era when punishment is imperative for offenses such as drunken driving but the prison costs can be cost-prohibitive, devices such as these make practical as well as punitive sense.
The additional units will be bought in part with a $110,000 state grant and subjects monitored must pay $7 per day for the service. That¹s a bargain compared to building new prisons or expanding current facilities. And that¹s what would be required to execute punishment for serious alcohol-related crime were it not for such devices.
This is money wellspent on a priority worthy of the attention.
As appearing in Sunday - February 20, 2005 edition of The Sun-Gazette
Posted by lois at 03:45 PM | Comments (0)
Intelligence Bill Signals Boon for Immigrant Incarceration Industry
...."one of the bill’s largely overlooked provisions authorizes 40,000 new immigrant detention beds by 2010. "
by Bob Libal; February 20, 2005
The recently passed Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) will intensify a crisis in immigrant communities while benefiting a burgeoning immigrant incarceration industry.
Amongst other things, the omnibus bill, passed in December 2004, consolidates the nation’s intelligence programs into a National Intelligence Program, creates a Director of National Intelligence, and increases border enforcement.
According to human rights advocates, some of the most odious measures in the original bill, such as depriving asylum seekers of judicial review and allowing deportation to countries where torture is likely, were removed before passage.
However, one of the bill’s largely overlooked provisions authorizes 40,000 new immigrant detention beds by 2010. That triples the current immigrant detention system continuing an assault on immigrant communities started in the Clinton administration and intensified since the 9/11 attacks.
The Human Face of Immigrant Incarceration
Only a handful of the current 22,000 immigrant detainees are suspected of any connection to terrorism. In fact, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, before 1996’s Anti Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was passed as few as 4,000 immigrants were detained on a given day. Most of the newly detained are either asylum seekers or “criminal aliens” – immigrants convicted of crimes, anything as low as shoplifting or minor drug possession charges – who are awaiting deportation hearings.
Aarti Shahani from New York-based Families for Freedom, a New York-based immigrant rights organization, says the addition of 40,000 immigrant detainment beds will put added strain on detainees and families already struggling with long detainments.
“There is a financial effect on families of the ongoing costs of telephone calls, commissaries, and travel, as well as the emotional effect of knowing your loved one is behind bars,” Shahani said.
Take, for example, Linden Corrica and Carol McDonald.
In 2003, Corrica, a legal resident from Guyana, was arrested and plead guilty to possession of marijuana in New York. Corrica, expected to be returned to his family after a few weeks in jail. Instead, immigration screeners at Rikers Island whisked him off to a federal detention center in Louisiana where he has been held, awaiting deportation hearings, for well over a year.
Carol McDonald, Corrica’s wife, says that his detainment has provided a hardship on the family. “It’s been really, really hard,” she says. “Right now I’m doing three jobs, number one to support me and my daughter who are here, and to support him and the telephone calls and the lawyer’s fee.”
McDonald says that most policy makers do not seem interested in how long detentions affect families. “They just want to deny that it’s affecting families,” she says. “They talk about family values, well here is real suffering.”
Incarceration for Profit
Sadly, what is bad for immigrant families, has become very good for business.
Notorious private prison companies like Corrections Corporation of America and the Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections) have been major benefactors of immigrant detention increases. The Department of Homeland Security contracts out for nearly all of its detention beds to private companies which are likely to receive substantial contract awards if the new legislation receives necessary funding.
“This is pork at its worst,” says Judy Greene, a policy analyst with the Justice Strategies. “This will be a massive new bailout of the private prison industry.”
And Greene isn’t alone in such predictions.
MSN Money’s Michael Brush, in a glowing analysis of prison industry stocks, writes that the legislation “makes it likely that more illegal immigrants will be caught.” He continues, “Lawmakers estimate that by 2010 the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement will need another 40,000 prison ‘beds,’ as they say in the business.”
Actually, Brush is a bit mistaken. While the increased border patrol does make it more likely that undocumented immigrants will be caught, that alone does not create a need for detention beds. Proven alternatives to detention exist.
Just ask the Vera Institute. From 1997-2000 they operated an Appearance Assistance Program for immigrant asylum seekers and “criminal aliens” to attempt to demonstrate that alternatives to detention exist. The program used a series of check-ups to ensure that immigrants would show up to their hearings, where an immigration judge will rule on their fate. Over 90% of people appeared for their immigration hearings in this program, a rate substantially higher than that for people released on bond or parole.
So, why the need for 40,000 new beds now? Shahani, of Families for Freedom, fears that the end result of this bill is that more people will end up spending longer amounts of time in detention centers. When there are an excess of beds, she says, there is little incentive for immigration courts to expedite hearings or practice alternatives to detention.
In addition, incarceration culture runs wild on Capitol Hill. A nation that locks up over 2.2 million people, the large majority for non-violent crimes, is more likely to refer immigrant detainees to jail cells than to other, more cost-effective solutions.
Private prison corporations will not be alone in looking to profit from the expanded detention system. Public entities, such as county jails and even state corrections departments may try to win the lucrative federal detention contracts.
Dana Kaplan of the National Resource Center on Prisons and Communities says the intelligence bill will further a growing trend of local jail expansion even at a time when many states are scaling back their state-controlled prison systems.
“When word is out that the government is looking to house 40,000 new detainees, that puts a huge incentive on local jail systems to expand especially when there is no funding for other services (that provide jobs) in the region,” Kaplan says.
New York is an example of the way that local jails can lead to a sort of back-door expansion to the prison system. According to Kaplan, while New York’s state prison population has slightly decreased in the past several years, the local jail system has expanded by nearly 16% in the past 10 years.
This trend is especially troubling because when prison expansion is decentralized, enormous political and economic pressure is expended to keep prison beds full.
Texas: Ground Zero for Immigrant Incarceration
In 2003, Reeves County, Texas built a 960 bed expansion to its 2,000 bed jail. The county, located in sparsely populated west Texas, built the expansion with the hopes of obtaining a federal contract to house detainees.
The only problem is that the contract never came. Even after desperate measure like hiring majority whip Tom Delay’s brother to lobby the federal government for prisoners, the expansion was still sitting empty after nearly a year. Eventually, the county privatized its jail and began importing prisoners from Arizona.
Reeves County represents an interesting paradox in the immigrant incarceration industry. On one hand, federal legislators have justified tripling the current detention system by claiming that the system is badly overcrowded. At the same time, many of the recently built immigrant detention centers are not full.
The answer to lies in the “if you build it, they will come” mentality that prison operators have taken to heart. Greene, Kaplan, and Shahani all agree that if the detention system is expanded, even when it appears that there is not an excess of detainees, the system will find people to warehouse in these facilities.
And Texas has become ground zero in this immigrant incarceration boom. The lone star state is home to at least 7,000 proposed or recently built prison beds – all of which are intended to house immigrant detainees and all of which are to be housed a private prison company.
IRTPA will hasten the spread of jails and detention centers in rural west and south Texas, a region fast becoming dependent on detention centers as a major source of economic development.
Where’s the hope?
According to Shahani, hope to stop immigrant detention expansion lies in a combined effort between immigrant communities and rural communities where the detention centers are sited.
There is a growing sense that prisons, jails, and detention centers are not the economic boon for small towns promised by jail developers.
In fact, a study from Washington State and Ohio State professors published in Social Science Quarterly last year studied 3,000 communities that built prisons in the past 30 years. The study found that those communities actually ended up with slower economic growth than similar communities that did not build prisons. The study has been used by community activists to derail several jail proposals.
Shahani recounts the story of taking families from New York to Louisiana to visit their loved ones in detention. In several of the detention facilities family members were not allowed to be in the same room, instead forced to communicate via a closed circuit television system. Many of the family members refused to make a return trip because they didn’t want to see the detainees in such inhumane conditions.
IRTPA will create 40,000 more of these heart-breaking stories. To drive back the damaging effects of this bill on immigrant communities will be a long process, but one worth fighting.
Bob Libal is a student/youth organizer for Grassroots Leadership’s Not With Our Money! campaign in Austin, Texas. He can be reached at bob@notwithourmoney.org.
http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=7278§ionID=43
ZNet | Repression
Posted by lois at 03:41 PM | Comments (0)
Eduardo Velasquez & five others suing MA for years wrongly spent in prison
Six suing state for years spent wrongly in prison
By Janette Neuwahl, Globe Correspondent | February 18, 2005
Six men who spent years behind bars in Massachusetts for crimes they didn't commit are each seeking up to $500,000 in compensation from the state under a new law that went on the books in January, state officials and lawyers said yesterday.
Lawyer Johnson and Neil Miller, both freed after spending a decade in prison, filed legal motions in Suffolk Superior Court requesting the compensation Wednesday. Their claims add to four other cases filed earlier this year. Johnson was freed in 1982 after a witness identified the shooter in a murder that had led to his conviction. Miller was freed in 1990 after DNA evidence cleared him of a rape.
''My life has been a wreck, and I'm still recovering from the devastation that started in 1972," Johnson said yesterday. ''My life has been in limbo. God knows where I would be if I hadn't gone through that injustice."
The six cases are the first filed under a law providing up to $500,000 in damages for those wrongfully convicted.
Four other wrongfully convicted men -- Dennis Maher, Marvin Mitchell, John Scullin, and Eduardo Velasquez (who went by the name Angel Hernandez) -- are also seeking damages from the state.
Under the law, passed by the Legislature late last year, exonerated individuals must seek a civil trial to make their case for the compensation. They have to provide evidence of their innocence either through a court order overturning the conviction or a governor's pardon. The former prisoners are allowed to receive up to $500,000, allowing the court to take into account lost income and other factors in determining the amount of the award.
Massachusetts joined more than a dozen other states with similar laws, including New York and Illinois, said Peter Neufeld, cofounder and codirector of The Innocence Project in New York City, which works to exonerate wrongfully convicted prisoners across the nation. Neufeld also serves as cocounsel on several cases already filed in Massachusetts superior courts.
''This statute is long overdue, and we're very optimistic that the attorney general will be supportive of these men and not treat these cases in an adversary way, but rather do everything humanly possible to provide quick, meaningful compensation for these people," Neufeld said.
The attorney general represents the state in the trials.
The move to compensate all of the wrongly convicted has taken years to become law. In 1982, state senators drafted a special act to compensate Johnson, a Roxbury native who was framed by a neighborhood acquaintance for the murder of a Chelsea man. A witness testified years later that the neighbor, Kenneth Myers, committed the murder. The Legislature did not pass that bill.
During the 1980s and early '90s, state lawmakers filed bills that addressed individuals who were wrongfully convicted, such as Johnson and Bobby Joe Leaster, who received $500,000 in 1992 from a special act of the Legislature.
In a legal claim filed Wednesday, Miller said he was ''subjected to mistreatment and abuse by guards and inmates alike" while imprisoned. Johnson, who is black, said in court papers that he was convicted of killing a white man ''in a highly charged trial at the beginning of the Boston busing crisis."
Johnson, 54, said in an interview yesterday that he picked up a drug habit and a tendency toward depression while in prison. Johnson added that he has not been able to get a job and lives in a drug treatment center, where he is trying to kick the addiction he fostered in prison.
The new law stipulates that wrongfully convicted prisoners freed before this year have three years from Jan. 1 to file their cases for compensation. For those exonerated in the future, the former prisoners must file for compensation within two years of leaving prison to collect damages.
Janette Neuwahl can be reached at jneuwahl@globe.com.
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Posted by lois at 03:36 PM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2005
AZ wants to build a state prison in Mexico
Border Action Network informs us that this lovely idea is alive again in Arizona....
As this article notes below, a proposal was floating around the Arizona legislature in 2003 to build an AZ state prison in Mexico that would house Mexican-nationals. Even more insidious was a proposed partnership with the US-Mexico Chamber of Commerce to have inmates doing work for maquilas and receiving job training for maquila-work while in the prison. As if the incentive to exploit immigrant workers within the U.S. isn't enough already, this type of proposal takes immigrant worker exploitation to another level! -Border Action
Thursday, February 17, 2005
State wants prison in Mexico
Lawmakers are discussing the possibility of building one to house illegal immigrants.
The Associated Press
PHOENIX - Some lawmakers want to explore the possibility of the state contracting to have a private prison built in Mexico to house illegal immigrants now incarcerated in Arizona. The idea was promoted as a way to reduce the state's heavy costs in imprisoning the 3,600 to 4,000 illegal immigrants, who have been convicted of crimes. Opponents questioned whether the state has the legal authority to move the foreign prisoners to Mexico.
A bill (HB2709) under which the state would seek proposals for such a prison moved forward yesterday, approved 4-2 by a House committee.
The bill is one of many moving through the Legislature that seeks to confront problems caused by illegal immigration.
More than any other state in recent years, Arizona has been dogged by a heavy flow of illegal immigrants after the government tightened enforcement in El Paso, Texas, and San Diego during the mid-1990s.
Several Arizona lawmakers have said the federal government hasn't done enough to confront illegal immigration and therefore has dumped massive costs on the state.
Gov. Janet Napolitano has recently billed the federal government for nearly $118 million in unreimbursed costs for imprisoning illegal immigrants.
The Mexico prison idea was proposed in the 1990s but shelved, partly due to legal concerns. It was revived in 2003 to help cover budget shortfalls but was rejected by a key legislative committee.
"We really lose nothing but we set the table with what is a reasonable proposal," said Republican Rep. Russ Jones of San Luis, sponsor of the bill.
Democratic Rep. Ted Downing of Tucson, an opponent of the proposal, said the bill raises questions about jurisdiction, such as which government would have the ability to seek prisoners if they escape.
Republican Rep. John McCommish of Phoenix, who also voted against the bill, questioned whether the state could fulfill its responsibility to oversee a prison if it was in another country.
"This is a creative idea and worthy of exploration," said Republican Rep. Bill Konopnicki of Safford.
Still, Konopnicki said, he's not sure the idea would prevail if it were considered by the full House.
Border Action Network/Accion Fronteriza
P.O. Box 384
Tucson, AZ 85702
Tel 520.623.4944
Fax 520.792.2097
www.borderaction.org
Posted by lois at 05:53 PM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2005
TX: Probation Overhaul Takes Shape
With eye toward saving money, reforms to include more programs, graduated sanctions
By Mike Ward Austin AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
The new form of Texas justice for nonviolent offenders began taking shape Tuesday as House budget writers tentatively agreed to overhaul probation programs with beefed-up supervision, new drug rehabilitation centers and a system of increasingly harsh sanctions for those who refuse to follow the rules.
As part of the changes, judges would be encouraged to sentence to probation people convicted of such things as theft, drug possession and property crimes.
In a rare public hearing involving the disparate parts of the current system, judges, prosecutors and probation and prison officials gave their initial blessing to the proposals.
Today, the House Appropriations criminal justice subcommittee is to begin work on legislation and a budget for the changes that, if approved, could bring a profound shift in how Texas deals with low-level criminals.
Rather than imprison more and more criminals at a skyrocketing cost, legislative leaders for the first time in decades are pressing to bolster probation and other community supervision programs that cost about $2 per offender per day. Each prison bed costs about $40 a day.
Subcommittee Chairman Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, likened the changes to how his parents raised him and his eight brothers and sisters.
"Some of us would get out of line, and we would be told, 'That was wrong. Don't do it again.' And they let us go about our business," he said. "For those who needed closer supervision, they would keep a hand on us and an eye on us. The system we're creating here must do that.
"We're not asking to let anybody go free. We're not asking judges to turn their head on holding people accountable for their crimes. We're not asking to go easy on anybody. We're just looking for a way to make the system work better for everyone than it is now."
After the hearing, Turner said the plan centers on allocating $62 million for temporary prison beds to hold a convict population that could exceed capacity as soon as next month. But rather than spend that money directly on beds, he said, incentives written into the law will allow counties to use the money for new probation and com- munity supervision programs.
Committee members also said they support additional money for local drug treatment programs, significant reductions in probation officers' caseloads, beefed-up community service programs, even special probation halfway houses or "night jails," where offenders could work during the day and serve their sentences at night.
Rep. Pat Haggerty, R-El Paso, predicted that the local programs will cost much less than incarcerating low-level offenders in a state prison.
Of special interest Tuesday was a pilot probation program in Fort Bend County, which in just a few months has reduced by more than 30 percent the number of convicts on probation sent on to prison for rule violations. If taken statewide, that program could mean tens of thousands fewer inmates in state prisons, Turner said.
The Fort Bend program is financed by a $360,000 state grant.
"For every buck we're putting in, we're saving the state two bucks," said Leighton Isles, director of the Fort Bend Community Supervision and Corrections Department.
Turner said that for the reforms to work, all of the people involved with the justice system "have to buy in."
And though judges and prosecutors indicated that they supported the proposals, several cautioned that the new system needs to be properly funded and flexible to work.
"The options have to include residential facilities, or else we won't have the options we need to make this work," said Michael Bernard, Bexar County's first assistant district attorney.
Troy Cotton, a Harris County assistant district attorney, echoed that sentiment. "We know we can't put a drug offender back on the street without treatment and make it work," he said.
Phillip Kazen, a state district judge in San Antonio, told the committee that the proposal is an opportunity for Texas.
"We may never have this opportunity . . . again," he said.
Posted by lois at 07:03 PM | Comments (0)
Arkansas: Bill Increasing Penalties for Pregnant Drug Users Rejected
By David Robinson Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK -A House panel narrowly rejected a bill Tuesday that would more severely punish pregnant women who possess illegal drugs.
The 10-10 vote on House Bill 1265 appears to have killed it, said its sponsor, Rep. Timothy Hutchinson, R-Lowell.
"All 20 members were there and all 20 voted," Hutchinson said of the House Judiciary Committee. "Unfortunately I think the bill is dead."
The bill would have applied to a pregnant woman's possession of any illegal drug, subjecting them to a penalty that's one class higher than others would face. For example, possession of methamphetamine is a class C felony, punishable by a 3-year to 10-year sentence. Under HB 1265, a pregnant woman would face a class B felony charge, which carries a 6-year to 20-year sentence, Hutchinson said.
Tuesday's vote followed testimony from several opponents, including drug treatment officials who said the better answer to the problem is rehabilitation.
Other opponents said that the bill could make pregnant women caught with drugs choose abortion to avoid the stiffer penalty.
The drug rehabilitation officials said illegal drugs cause temporary health problems for newborns while alcohol causes permanent disabilities. Illicit drugs are even less damaging than tobacco, said Cynthia Crone, who directs a treatment program at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences at Little Rock.
Hutchinson's bill does not address alcohol or tobacco use by pregnant women.
"To care for one child affected by fetal alcohol syndrome per lifetime is $3 million," said Crone, of Arkansas Cares at UAMS. "We could do a lot of prevention and a lot of treatment for preventing one fetal alcohol syndrome child."
Crone said more than 75 percent of her program's patients were drug free a year after treatment.
"The best way to help these children is to help their mothers," she said.
Crone said such women are usually struggling anyway, and saddling mothers a felony conviction would make them ineligible for housing, college and other benefits that could help her provide for her children. Putting mothers in prison also would likely mean sending the children to foster homes, which she said is often worse for the child than staying with the mother.
She also said that at least 6,000 pregnant women a year would test positive for illicit drugs in Arkansas, not including tobacco and alcohol.
Duane Griffin, executive director of Omart, a residential drug and alcohol treatment center in Gassville, said he has four beds available for such women and has a waiting list through May.
"I could fill 12 beds if I had them and had the money to operate them," Griffin said.
Like Crone, Griffin said treatment is the best option for pregnant women rather than a felony, which they said would, in effect, place a life sentence on the woman.
Both said they consider addiction a disease and that any pregnant woman who is taking drugs is thinking irrationally and needs help.
Hutchinson countered that a mother who uses illegal drugs is giving the drug directly to her unborn child, which is deserving of a stronger penalty.
Hutchinson compared a pregnant mother's use of methamphetamine to delivery of the drug, which is a class Y felony, the highest class.
"In this case, a mother chooses to inject, to give methamphetamine to her unborn child, directly to that child's bloodstream," Hutchinson said. "I say let's make that a B felony, far from a Y felony. I think it's only fair."
Hutchinson said he would support increased funding for treatment programs but also believes the tougher penalties must be applied. He said he plans to pursue the bill again in the 2007 session.
Posted by lois at 06:56 PM | Comments (0)
KY: Bill would boost funding for Jails
02/16/05 By James Mayse
Messenger-Inquirer, Owensboro, KY
FRANKFORT -- A bill that would increase the amount Kentucky pays county jails to hold state prisoners drew strong support Tuesday from legislators and county elected officials.
The bill, which was discussed Tuesday by the House Appropriations and Revenue Committee, would raise the daily rate the state pays county jails per inmate from $26.51 to $30.51 during fiscal year 2005-06 and would raise the rate to $34.51 in 2006-07. After that, the rate would be adjusted annually based on increases in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers.
House Bill 500 also calls for the state to reimburse county jails for state prisoners' medical costs beginning in 2007-08 and to give county jails, beginning in 2008, 50 percent of the daily rate for inmates who were housed in county jails and had time served credited to a sentence. The time served rate would increase to 100 percent in 2009-10. County jails holding inmates on state charges do not receive the daily rate until the person being held is convicted.
The bill also calls for the state to assume full responsibility for housing all prisoners in Kentucky in 2010 and make county jailers part of the state corrections system. Jailers would still be elected in their counties.
Vince Lang, executive director of the Kentucky County Judge-Executives Association, said housing state prisoners -- and paying their medical costs -- is straining county budgets.
"The costs associated with housing prisoners have deprived counties" of funds for other projects, Lang said. "County jail populations have increased tenfold. ... Many counties are contributing 20 percent of their general fund for this alone."
Inmates' medical costs have also increased, Lang said. "There has been no effort by the state to keep up with these costs," he said.
Larue County Judge-Executive Tommy Turner said counties receive a smaller daily stipend for housing state prisoners now than they received in 1982.
Committee member Rep. Stephen Nunn, a Glasgow Republican, said the state should pay a large percentage of state prisoners' medical bills. "I think we need to be paying 75 to 80 percent at least," Nunn said.
The bill was not put up for a vote Tuesday. Rep. Harry Moberly Jr., the committee's chairman, said legislators recognize counties have a problem covering the cost of state prisoners.
"I don't think there's anybody here who would disagree with what you've said," Moberly said. "We want to work with you."
Daviess County commissioners Bruce Kunze, Jim Lambert and Mike Riney attended the meeting. "Our problem is not just the daily (stipend); it's that when we incarcerate a person, the state doesn't pick up funding until they are convicted," Riney said. "In addition to considering raising the per diem, they need to consider that a state prisoner is a state prisoner" when they are incarcerated on state charges, Riney said.
The Daviess County Detention Center had 325 state prisoners, 249 Daviess County inmates and one inmate from another county on Tuesday.
Daviess County Jailer David Osborne, attending a legislative meeting of the Kentucky Jailers Association in Frankfort on Tuesday, said he and other jailers around the state are looking to state government to share more of the cost of housing and providing medical treatment to inmates.
"We're in support of anything that can ease the burden on the county taxpayers," Osborne said. "It's an issue of whether we're going to be able to raise some revenue."
A member of the jailer association's board of directors, Osborne said the association's legislative meeting was one of the best attended he's seen. "I think there is a lot of interest in it around the state in getting more support from the state," he said.
Kunze said housing state inmates was one of the main reasons Daviess Fiscal Court passed an occupational tax in 2004.
"If the jail were not an issue ... the occupational tax would not have been passed in Daviess County," Kunze said.
Rep. Derrick Graham, a Frankfort Democrat and one of the bill's sponsors, said he worked with county judge-executives and jailers while crafting the bill. Graham said he hoped the bill would be voted on by the House appropriations committee next week.
"I just filed it (Monday), and they heard it today," Graham said. "Time is of the essence."
Posted by lois at 06:52 PM | Comments (0)
No Defense---More on the conviction of Lynne Stewart
February 17, 2005, NY Times
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR By ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
THE conviction of Lynne F. Stewart for providing material aid to terrorism and for lying to the government is another perverse victory in the Justice Department's assault on the Constitution.
Ms. Stewart, the lawyer who was convicted last week of five felonies, will be disbarred and faces up to 30 years in jail. She represented Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, not exactly a sympathetic character. He is the leader of the Islamic Group, a terrorist organization that plotted the assassination of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and masterminded the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
He was sentenced in 1996 to life in prison. When Ms. Stewart sought to visit her client in jail, prison officials required her to sign an affirmation that she would abide by special rules requiring that she communicate with the sheikh only about legal matters. The rules also forbade her from passing messages to third parties, like the news media. Yet the jury found that Ms. Stewart frequently made gibberish comments in English to distract prison officials who were trying to record the conversation between the sheikh and his interpreter, and that she "smuggled" messages from her jailed client to his followers.
But if the federal government had followed the law, Ms. Stewart would never have been required to agree to these rules to begin with. Just after 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft gave himself the power to bypass the lawyer-client privilege, which every court in the United States has upheld, and eavesdrop on conversations between prisoners and their lawyers if he had reason to believe they were being used to "further facilitate acts of violence or terrorism." The regulation became effective immediately.
In the good old days, only Congress could write federal criminal laws. After 9/11, however, the attorney general was allowed to do so. Where in the Constitution does it allow that?
Mr. Ashcroft's rules, with their criminal penalties, violate the Sixth Amendment, which grants all persons the right to consult with a lawyer in confidence. Ms. Stewart can't effectively represent her clients - no lawyer can - if the government listens to and records privileged conversations between lawyers and their clients. The threat of a government prosecution would loom over their meetings.
These rules also violate the First Amendment's right to free speech. Especially in a controversial case, a defense lawyer is right to advocate for her client in the press, just as the government uses the press to put forward its case. Unless there is a court order that bars both sides from speaking to reporters, it should be up to the lawyer to decide whether to help her client through the news media.
Ms. Stewart's constitutional right to speak to the news media about a matter of public interest is absolute and should prevent the government from prosecuting her. And since when does announcing someone else's opinion about a cease-fire - as Ms. Stewart did, saying the sheik no longer supported one that had been observed in Egypt - amount to advocating an act of terrorism?
In truth, the federal government prosecuted Lynne Stewart because it wants to intimidate defense lawyers into either refusing to represent accused terrorists or into providing less than zealous representation. After she was convicted, Ms. Stewart said, "You can't lock up the lawyers, you can't tell the lawyers how to do their jobs."
No doubt the outcome of this case will have a chilling effect on lawyers who might represent unpopular clients. Since 9/11 the federal government's message has been clear: if you defend someone we say is a terrorist, we may declare you to be one of them, and you will lose everything.
The Stewart conviction is a travesty. She faces up to 30 years in prison for speaking gibberish to her client and the truth to the press. It is devastating for lawyers and for any American who may ever need a lawyer. Shouldn't the Justice Department be defending our constitutional freedoms rather than assaulting them?
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is an analyst for Fox News and the author of "Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Posted by lois at 04:57 PM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2005
TX Legislature: Prison Plan-Swap beds for Programs
House budget-writers looking to try something new to save money.
By Mike Ward AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, February 10, 2005
In a clear and potentially significant shift in state policy, a House budget panel on Wednesday began assembling a sweeping prison reform package that hinges on keeping thousands of Texas lawbreakers out of prison.
Instead of earmarking millions to pay for new prisons and leased prison beds to hold a growing population of new convicts, lawmakers discussed a tradeoff: Figure out what the new beds would cost, then allow prison officials to spend much of that money on expanded probation programs, rehabilitation and drug treatment services that would give the lawbreakers a much better chance of returning to the streets as law-abiding citizens — and are much cheaper.
"We're talking about changing our whole mind-set on criminal justice, redefining and fundamentally changing the way our whole system works," said Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, who chairs the panel. "We simply don't have the money to continue building more and more new prisons that will just fill up and then make us build even more.
"We can't afford that system any more."
Gov. Rick Perry joined the debate, labeling new prisons as last on his list of justice priorities.
"There are better, more efficient ways to deal with this prison population than going and building more prisons," he said.
Under the plan, older and infirm inmates who pose a minimal threat to society could be transferred from prison cells to nursing home-like programs where federal Medicaid and Medicare funds could pay the bills instead of state taxpayers.
Not so many years ago, such public talk about spending big money on alternatives to prison, in a state that prides itself as being tough on crime, would have stood little chance of passing.
Ann del Llano, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said she is heartened by the shift in legislators' sentiments. "Unlike other areas of state government, these solutions in criminal justice can pay for themselves," she said. "But I think the public is ready to see treatment, not prisons, and that's why you're seeing this happen."
House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden, R-Plano, said many of the prison reforms should happen, with or without new money.
"We may have to build some beds because we can't create all the new programs we need overnight," he said, "but what is not going to happen this legislative session is another big prison construction program like we did 15 years ago. We're going to find a way to do this intelligently this time."
Under initial details outlined Wednesday, up to $62 million in additional budget funds would be earmarked to temporarily lease enough prison beds to ease an immediate crowding problem. As soon as March, officials testified, the 112 state prisons and other lockups may be full — the first time that has occurred in more than a decade.
During discussions Wednesday, Rep. Pat Haggerty, R-El Paso questioned whether that money would be much better spent on probation programs, in cases of nonviolent offenders. Each prison bed costs about $40 a day; each probationer about $2.
Committee members nodded in agreement as they discussed diverting future funds out of prisons and into those programs.
Other proposals: Lower caseloads for probation officers so they can better supervise the offenders who are on the streets; provide more drug-treatment beds for probationers, so they won't have to go to prison; and provide more in-prison and community treatment programs for more mentally ill offenders, so they don't commit new crimes.
"This year, the recommendation we make to the Appropriations Committee has to be more than just dollars and cents," Turner said. "It's got to change the way we do business."
Posted by lois at 06:54 PM | Comments (0)
Arkansas: Bill to Report Mothers Who Are Addicted Clears Committee
By Doug Thompson
Arkansas News Bureau, Feb. 15, 2005
LITTLE ROCK - Cases of babies born with an addiction to illegal drugs or health problems arising from the mother's use of an illegal drug would have to be reported to the state as a case of neglect under a bill that received committee approval on Monday.
Senate Bill 114 by Sen. Tim Wooldridge, D-Paragould, was recommended by the Senate Public Health, Welfare and Labor Committee on Monday, despite concerns by addiction counselors that the measure might discourage mothers with addictions from seeking needed medical attention.
"My heart wants to support this bill. My head says we have to be careful about the unintended consequences," said David Deere, spokesman for the Pulaski County Community Action Group, a group of counseling and health care professionals. Opening a charge of neglect might scare some expectant mothers away from seeking health care, he said.
The chief witness in favor of the bill was Betty Stahl of Paragould, who had twin grandchildren born with addiction and health-related problems. One did not survive, dying shortly after birth.
"This is not about revenge. This is about other babies who are out there," Stahl told the committee.
As the law stands now, doctors who report babies with addictions and problems related to illegal drug use could be held liable for violating their patients' confidentiality, the committee was told.
"If a child comes into the emergency room with an arm that's been broken by abuse, the doctor has to report that. If a child is born in the delivery room with serious, life-threatening conditions that can never be fully cured, he can't report it," Wooldridge said in an interview after the committee meeting.
Opponents of the bill said there is a wealth of evidence that smoking and drinking during pregnancy causes serious health problems, but there is no similar bill to charge the mothers of neglect in those cases.
Wooldridge and medical experts in support of the bill replied that, according to the best available statistics, 30 percent or more of children are abused in a home where the mother is so seriously addicted to an illegal drug that she continues taking the drugs heavily during a pregnancy. Incidences of abuse in homes where tobacco or alcohol are abused are much less, bill supporters said.
"You're giving them the alternative to either stop using drugs or stop going to get health care," said Rita Sklar, director of the Arkansas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. "Do we really want babies born in homes, alleys and hotel rooms?"
Copyright © Arkansas News Bureau, 2003 - 2005
Posted by lois at 06:46 PM | Comments (0)
The Trial of Lynn Stewart and What it Means
Radical Sheik
An elegy for radical lawyering.
By David Feige Posted Monday, Feb. 14, 2005- Slate
In a spacious courtroom on Foley Square, in downtown Manhattan, a jury just did an unfortunate thing. It convicted Lynne Stewart, a radical lawyer, of charges that she aided and abetted terrorists.
I know Lynne Stewart—I saw her many times in the well-worn hallways of Bronx Supreme Court, arguing cases on behalf of poor, mostly unknown clients. She had an impressive bearing, burnished by her years of defending radicals and the occasional mobster. Stewart was a compelling combination of warm and fierce—a woman possessed of both great compassion and real principle.
Her troubles began over a dozen years ago when she undertook the representation of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric convicted in connection with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The sheik, convicted of conspiracy in 1995 along with nine other people, was eventually sentenced to life and imprisoned in a solitary-confinement cell in Minnesota. He was also subjected to highly restrictive "special administrative measures"—designed by the government to silence those whose views or knowledge or influence it considers dangerous.
Continue Article
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Despite his conviction, Ms. Stewart continued to advocate for the sheik. But in order to meet with him in prison, she had to sign an agreement abiding by the terms of those SAMs—among them a prohibition against presenting the sheik's views in public. Stewart needed to see her client. She signed the forms.
The problem was that at some point in her representation, Stewart decided that the only way to ameliorate the sheik's sentence and the terms of his confinement was to keep his case in the public eye in the hopes that he'd be allowed to serve out his sentence in Egypt. Stewart faced a difficult situation—the right thing for her client was something the government had made her promise not to do. But in Stewart's mind, the client came first. She called the press.
As a result of that call, Ms. Stewart was herself indicted and charged with lying to the government (for violating the conditions of the SAMs) and with providing material aid to terrorism. Essentially, her decision to advocate for the sheik by talking to the press in order to keep his case in the spotlight was what was on trial. According to the government, by making those statements Stewart herself became part of a terrorist conspiracy.
Imagine spending six months of your life sitting in a courtroom, on trial for what amounts to your life (Ms. Stewart, already 65 years old and a grandmother, now faces spending the rest of her life in prison). It's the kind of experience that, win or lose, makes you never, ever want to mess with the government again. And that is both the point and the problem: Her indictment alone had had a chilling effect on defense attorneys, and the conviction may well mean the government gets what it really wants—a docile defense bar that refuses to touch terrorism cases for fear of themselves becoming targets.
Her trial was a monster—six months and nearly 90,000 tape-recorded calls to home phones and cell phones around the world, all culled and analyzed for hints of Stewart's complicity. The tapes didn't really show much. After all, the government couldn't show that anything bad had happened as a result of the press conference, nor could they link Stewart to any global ring of terrorists or act of terror. But unfortunately for Stewart, the government had more than just the phone calls—it had fear. During the course of the trial, prosecutors played a pre-9/11 videotape in which Osama Bin Laden threatens to attack the United States as a means of winning the sheik's release from prison. This, despite the fact that—as the judge pointed out—Bin Laden was never a part of the case against Ms. Stewart.
Still, the "fear card" had been dealt, both in jury selection, by picking an anonymous (and thus terrified) jury, and then built upon in the invocation of Bin Laden and Sept. 11. That, along with what, on its face, seems a clear violation of the SAMs was enough to persuade the jury to convict Ms. Stewart on all the charges against her. And that's a tragedy for all of us.
Make no mistake about it—the Stewart trial was just a small battle in a larger culture war. At issue is our tolerance for radical dissent, and at stake is the traditional role of the defense lawyer as zealous advocate and anointed spokesman for the interests of the prosecuted. By allowing the government to transubstantiate client access into that lawyer's own silence, the jury has dealt a blow to radical points of view everywhere. The list of people the government has considered seditious and dangerous over the years is long and frightening in its breadth. By validating the use of SAMs to silence lawyers, the jury has effectively silenced a whole class of inmates that the government alone gets to define. And in an age in which that same government argues to the Supreme Court for the power to detain suspects without charges and institutes policies designed to better leverage lax torture standards in other countries, the squelching of dissent—and, more perniciously, the squelching of those who represent dissenters—is a dangerous and unsettling precedent.
What the Stewart jury effectively did was to criminalize radical lawyering. And while that may be a great victory for the government in its fight against radicalism and the lure of terrorist ideas, our nation has always thrived on the notion that nothing defeats evil and seditious ideas quite like better ideas—that open and engaged debate and public denunciations of evil are always better than a government that dictates which ideas are acceptable and which will be silenced.
There aren't a lot of people willing to forgo the easy riches that come with a law degree to do the tough and unpopular work of defending indigent, reviled clients. And there are even fewer who are both good at it and passionate about it. Lynne Stewart was of those few. She'd take any case—the tougher the better, and unlike so many others, she never did it for the money and she always did it well. And while the 30 years she spent in the trenches made her great in the eyes of the poor and the despised, and an inspiration to young lawyers getting their first taste of the bitter dish the government serves up to those it prosecutes, it also made her a perfect target for a bully government looking to re-draw the lines of appropriate advocacy.
Lynne Stewart's conviction sends the strong message that, where terrorism is concerned, our citizens may no longer accept the vigorous defense of unpopular people. Unfortunately, it means something else, too—that the terror about terrorism has yet to give way to rationality. Merely flaunting pictures of Osama Bin Laden may be enough to justify any policy or convict any defendant. But as Lynne herself might have said, as scary as Osama Bin Laden might be, the only greater terror than terrorism is a society that abandons the principles that protect us all.
David Feige, a public defender in the Bronx and a Soros Media Justice Fellow, is the author of the book Indefensible, to be published in 2005.
Posted by lois at 06:42 PM | Comments (0)
Bedtime for Jerry Brown
Linda Evans, Dorsey Nunn, Rose Braz
Tuesday, February 15, 2005, San Francisco Chronicle
Once again, Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown is scapegoating people on parole for his failure to ensure public safety. He proposes that treating people on parole or probation like children by imposing a 10 p.m. curfew will decrease crime. Studies cited below, however, uniformly show that Brown is wrong, that public safety can only be guaranteed when people coming home from prison have jobs and housing, when they can reunite with their children and when they are welcomed back rather than sent back to prison for being out after 10 p.m.
- Brown rightly points out that Oakland desperately needs new solutions to its public-safety problems. But curfews aren't new, and studies show they just don't work. In 2003, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science published the results of a systematic review of juvenile curfews nationwide and concluded "the evidence does not support the argument that curfews prevent crime and victimization." In 1999, the Western Criminological Review also mounted an exhaustive review of existing curfews, finding that "There is no support for the hypothesis that jurisdictions with curfews experience lower crime levels."
People coming home from prison can't get jobs or pay rent because of the entrenched discrimination they face in employment, welfare and food stamps, housing and student loans. Rather than support an end to this discrimination or provide meaningful community-based re-entry services, Brown proposes to increase the prison population by incarcerating those who violate their parole for being out after 10 p.m. Brown wants to continue the lockdown conditions of prison after the inmates have been released.
The curfew also continues the misdirected targeting of people of color, giving Oakland police one more opportunity to keep up their admitted practice of racial profiling. Whom will Oakland police stop at 10 p.m. to check whether they are on parole? What neighborhoods will see a lockdown from 10 p.m. to 6 a. m.? This curfew is a reincarnation of the 1865 Black Codes, where ex-slaves traveling after 10 p.m. without a note from their employer could be imprisoned.
Maybe the curfew is Brown's solution to the housing crisis that has left up to 80 percent of parolees homeless. Where will homeless parolees go at 10 p. m. to avoid a violation? Prison should not be the only housing alternative for homeless people on parole or probation.
In the face of community outrage, Brown is spinning the curfew as a limited pilot project, but the truth is that Brown has not released a written policy and there has been no input by the Oakland City Council and no public hearings. The curfew also flies in the face of the state's new parole policy, which encourages alternatives to incarceration for technical parole violations. Brown, however, wants to lock people up for at least one week when a parolee has been out past 10 p.m. and then give them "the option" of a drug rehabilitation program or prison. But there are already long waiting lists for rehab programs. Even the governor supports sanctions other than prison for technical parole violations.
Economically, a curfew isn't feasible, either. Oakland can't find money to keep its schools open; Alameda County is scrambling for money for re-entry services. Does spending thousands to send someone to prison -- when the annual cost per inmate is $35,000 -- for being out past 10 p.m. make sense? Will it keep Oakland safe?
If we look more closely at this house arrest proposal, we see a politician trying to get elected state attorney general by stigmatizing people of color. He should not be allowed to advance his political career by demonizing people and communities who have already been scarred by the California prison system. Brown needs to learn that the only route to public safety is job training, employment and housing for people on probation and parole and an end to the discrimination that makes it nearly impossible to succeed after a prison term.
Dorsey Nunn and Linda Evans are members of All of Us or None, a national organization that fights discrimination against former prisoners. Rose Braz is the director of Critical Resistance, a grassroots organization based in Oakland that seeks to end the reliance on prisons as an answer to social problems.
Page B - 7
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/02/15/EDG0GBAU4F1.DTL
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle
Posted by lois at 06:37 PM | Comments (0)
February 15, 2005
CT: States Wants Former Inmate to Pay Cost of Incarceration
Meggan Clark, New Haven Register 02/14/2005
BETHANY — After more than two years behind bars, recovering narcotics addict Kathleen White figured she’d paid her debt to society.
She was wrong.
In early January, White received an unexpected correspondence from the state Department of Administrative Services: an itemized bill for $67,165, which the Department of Correction says was the cost of her incarcerations.
State wants former inmate to pay cost of incarceration
"I’d heard about that, but I didn’t think they’d do it to anyone who didn’t win the lottery," White said ruefully during an interview at her mother’s home in Bethany. "How dare (they) charge me to be treated like a dog?"
White, 36, served time on charges of possession of narcotics and violation of probation.
White and her attorney, Jack Keyes of New Haven, maintain White drew attention to herself by filing a civil lawsuit against a former friend’s landlord. The lawsuit alleges the landlord’s oven blew up in White’s face, causing her serious injury.
Keyes believes he has a good chance of winning a substantial sum for White. Unfortunately for his client, the Department of Correction is entitled to half of any money White wins from that lawsuit, and White said the state medical insurance program is after the other half.
White said she doesn’t mind paying for the cost of her medical care over the years in prison. But paying the Department of Correction for her incarceration is another story.
Keyes says the department is making the claim under a rarely enforced law that allows the state to recoup the cost of incarceration if an inmate wins the lottery, inherits a substantial amount of money or wins a legal claim.
"I think, before this case, I had seen (the law) applied once in my life and heard of it maybe 10 times," Keyes said. He added that it’s usually the assets of welfare recipients, not former prisoners, which the state is after.
But Brian Garnett, a spokesman for the Department of Correction, indicated the practice is a lot more common than that. The department recovered more than $1.3 million from former inmates in 2004, he said.
Laws on such collection from inmates vary from state to state, and can include trying to recoup medical costs, room and board, and clothing, according to information provided by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
According to the itemized bill White received from Connecticut, she owes $25,970 for an 8½-month incarceration in 1999, $17,778 for two stints behind bars totaling about six months in 2002, and $23,424 for an eight-month sentence that ended in June 2004.
During that time, White maintains she was incarcerated in barely livable conditions at the York Correctional Institution in East Lyme, working for pennies an hour, and said she was forced to buy necessities such as shampoo and toothpaste at vastly inflated prices at the prison store. When inmates spend their days compiling records for state databases, White says, they’re paid 30 cents an hour — a significant savings for the state. Yet the state expects her to pay back the full cost of every day she was incarcerated.
Garnett confirmed that inmates working at Datacon, York’s data entry training program, make an average of 35 to 40 cents an hour, and inmates doing non-vocational work make between $0.75 and $1.75 per day. He also confirmed that they’re required to buy soap, shampoo and other necessities at the prison store, but he said prices are not inflated. He also said low inmate wages and recouping the cost of incarceration from inmates like White are unrelated issues.
"The Department of Correction, in cooperation with the Department of Administrative Services … does look for inmates who have the ability to pay the cost of their incarceration," Garnett said. "If we find out, for example, through mail review or through telephone monitoring that someone has significant assets, we pass that information on to the (DAS)."
He noted that both inmate wages and the department’s right to bill for the cost of incarceration are set by statute.
If the DAS isn’t successful in collecting, claims are sent to the attorney general. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said his office has prosecuted about 20 collection cases against inmates in the past five years, for amounts ranging from $20,000 to $140,000.
"Only a small percentage of prisoners in Connecticut prisons … have sufficient assets to pay for incarceration, but when claims are referred to my office, we pursue them in court if necessary," Blumenthal said.
"My main interest is that the law be enforced uniformly and fairly, and we endeavor to do so whenever the Department of Correction asks us to collect money from an inmate."
He said the state tries to seize the money "without unduly burdening individuals who are trying to rehabilitate and recover and pursue productive lives." Blumenthal said he’s not familiar with White’s case because it hasn’t been referred to his office.
White said she is feeling unduly burdened. Now that she’s on the radar screen, she expects the Department of Correction will be after her mother’s house if she ever inherits it, along with any other large or small windfall that comes her way.
"Like anything else, once the file comes to the forefront, it’s in the forefront," Keyes said. "It’s better off being in the back row than in the front row."
A former nurse, White says she’s lost "my home, my car, my boyfriend and basically my life," since her narcotics addiction began after brain surgery in the early 1990s. Now, she says, the state is only making it more difficult for her to put her life back together.
She blames no one but herself for the problems that sent her to prison, but said that now, because she is a felon, she has not been able to find work.
"How am I ever going to get on my feet if they’re going to take over everything I get?" she asked.
Meggan Clark can be reached at 876-6800 or mclark@nhregister.com.
Posted by lois at 07:10 PM | Comments (0)
Update: Brain Dead Prisoner is Granted "Early Release"
Daniel Provencio, who had five months left to serve, was struck in the head by a foam ball fired by a Wasco State Prison guard on Jan. 16. By Jenifer Warren Times Staff Writer
February 15, 2005, LA Times
SACRAMENTO - In a move they called exceedingly rare, state prison officials Monday granted an early release to an inmate who was shot last month by a correctional officer and has been declared brain-dead.
Daniel Provencio, 28, has been connected to a ventilator and feeding tubes in a Bakersfield hospital since Jan. 16, when he was struck in the head by a foam projectile.
Under an agreement between the Department of Corrections and the inmate's family, Provencio was discharged from custody although he had about five months left to serve. Relatives had hoped to transfer him closer to their Ventura County homes, but they acknowledged Monday that he was too fragile to move and that other hospitals had declined to accept him.
"Because of his condition, nobody will take him," Provencio's brother, Johnny, said. "Nobody is willing to do anything for him."
A spokesman for the prison system said Provencio's medical care, which had been paid by the Department of Corrections, probably would be covered by Medi-Cal. By late Monday afternoon, a guard was no longer standing near Provencio's hospital bed. The inmate had been guarded around the clock as part of a Department of Corrections policy.
"We finally found a solution that the hospital, family members and the department can all live with," Corrections Department spokesman Todd Slosek said.
The shooting at Wasco State Prison, a 6,100-inmate lockup near Bakersfield, remains under investigation by the department and state Inspector General Matt Cate.
The case has sparked interest among prison reformers, legislators and others because it raises questions about how corrections officials handle brain-dead inmates whose families are not ready to say goodbye.
In addition, critics have expressed concerns about the department's policy of requiring that prisoners in community hospitals be guarded 24 hours a day by at least one correctional officer. For Provencio, that requirement cost $1,056 per day. The department could not immediately provide the cost of his medical care.
Earlier this month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called guarding brain-dead and comatose inmates "ludicrous" at a meeting with the editorial board of the San Jose Mercury News.
Schwarzenegger said the state needs to "tighten the screw so we don't have this misuse of money. And instead of having these two guys standing there 24 hours a day guarding this guy that is in a coma, why not have these two guys working somewhere else where they really are needed."
Corrections officials said the policy, which was designed to protect hospital staff, other patients and the inmates, was under review. They said that in many cases, the state's contract with community hospitals requires such protection.
Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), chairwoman of a legislative oversight committee on prisons, said she had asked for statistics on how many other comatose or brain-dead inmates are under 24-hour guard, which she called "a totally crazy policy."
As for Provencio's release, Romero said, it was "clearly the right thing to do. But I'm troubled that once again it took an outraged reaction from the public and legislators to make the department act."
Provencio was shot after a fight broke out in a lounge area as about 40 inmates were being given dinner. Three prisoners were involved, and one tried to restrain guards who intervened. Officials have declined to say what Provencio's role was.
After officers ordered the inmates down on the floor, a guard in an elevated control room fired a large, foam pellet from a 40-millimeter launcher. The foam balls, which are used for riot control, are considered non-lethal and are meant to be fired at a person's extremities, prison officials said.
Provencio was taken to Mercy Hospital, where family members said doctors induced a coma to operate and relieve swelling on his brain. Since then, neurologists have declared him brain-dead, his family said.
Divorced with a young son who lives in Oxnard, Provencio was serving his second term in state prison - this time for a parole violation of drunk driving. Previously, he had served three years and eight months for narcotics violations.
His mother, Nancy Mendoza, said he had recently kicked a heroin habit and was working a steady job laying utility pipe. He was arrested while driving home from a Father's Day party at his aunt's house last year.
Johnny Provencio said that doctors repeatedly had asked family members to disconnect his brother from life support.
"They tell us that he is already dead, his spirit has left the body, and there is nothing they can do for him," Johnny Provencio said. "We told them pulling the plug is not an option."
Mendoza has said that she is hoping for a miracle because Johnny Provencio survived a coma as an infant. He is now 29.
"You see things all the time that give you hope," Johnny Provencio said. "Anything can happen."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prisoner15feb15,1,4361112.story?coll=la-
headlines-california
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
Posted by lois at 04:51 PM | Comments (0)
New Report: Voting Rights Restoration
New Report: Voting Rights Restoration
The Sentencing Project announces the publication of a new report, Barred for Life: Voting Rights Restoration in Permanent Disenfranchisement States, that examines the rights restoration process in the 14 states in which disenfranchisement may last for a lifetime. The study finds that in 11 of these states, less than 3% of disenfranchised persons have had their rights restored in recent years. In each of the 14 states, some or all persons convicted of a felony lose their voting rights even after completion of their sentence, and often for life. While each state has a process in place whereby persons with felony convictions can apply for restoration, in practice few are able to do so successfully. The study identifies a range of obstacles in most states, including overly cumbersome processes, lengthy and confusing waiting periods, inappropriate character tests, and inadequate data collection. The Sentencing Project calls on states to reform current practices in this area and to work for repeal of permanent disenfranchisement laws.
www.sentencingproject.org
Posted by lois at 04:49 PM | Comments (0)
MA: Lt. Gov. Post-Incarceration Bill
Healey touts post-prison aid bill
Goal is to lower rate of recidivism
By Janette Neuwahl and Joanna Weiss, Globe Correspondent
February 15, 2005, Boston Globe
In a bid to reduce the number of released convicts who wind up back in jail, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey proposed a bill yesterday that would require post-prison supervision for all convicted felons in Massachusetts.
Under the bill, every released inmate in the state would be assigned to a parole or probation officer and would receive job training, access to drug treatment programs, housing assistance, and other services designed to help their transition back into society.
Currently, 20,000 prisoners are released in Massachusetts every year, and 40 percent of them leave prison with no supervision.
''One trip to jail should be enough," Healey said at a news conference yesterday. ''We need to make sure the money we spend on incarceration here in Massachusetts not only punishes crime, but also stops crime from happening in the future."
The bill is part of the Romney administration's ongoing attempt to change the criminal justice system, an effort spearheaded by Healey, who did research in the field before she entered politics. National criminal justice specialists say it represents a current trend in prison reform: not just ensuring that people serve their full sentences, but giving them support when they get out.
''It's the pendulum swinging back and forth," said Peggy Burke, a principal at the Center for Effective Public Policy, a Maryland-based think tank. ''We have spent so much effort on incarceration, and people thought that was going to solve the problem."
Governor Mitt Romney and Healey considered a similar approach last year. This time, a key state representative is raising concerns.
Saying problems in the criminal justice system are deeply rooted, Representative David P. Linsky, a Natick Democrat, took aim instead at mandatory sentencing requirements, which force state judges to imprison drug dealers and users who are ineligible for parole and probation.
Mandatory sentences are packing state prisons and jails, prompting judges to give lighter sentences to violent criminals just to reduce the strain on prisons, Linsky said.
Linsky has filed bills to make drug offenders eligible for parole and probation, which he said would save more money in the long run.
''This is a good first step, but there's a lot more that needs to be done," Linsky said. ''If they don't free up more resources by having fewer people behind bars, we'll have to add money to the budget to pay for parole and probation officers."
But Healey said the new bill could save the state money in the long run. It costs $43,000 per year to keep one person in prison, she said, so reducing recidivism by 1 percent would save $1 million per year.
Maureen Walsh, chairwoman of the state Parole Board, said the bill would put Massachusetts in line with other states that have adopted post-release supervision requirements.
''Massachusetts is in a minority of states that don't have this [legislation] in place," Walsh said.
Across the country, prison reform advocates say, criminals return to prison at alarming rates. About two-thirds of released criminals nationally are rearrested within three years. A 2002 study by the Massachusetts Sentencing Commission showed that 49 percent of state offenders commit crimes within a year of leaving prison.
State officials yesterday said inmates don't get enough support to transition well to the outside world.
In the past four months, 91 percent of the former inmates who visited state ''reentry centers," voluntary centers that offer transitional services, were unemployed, Walsh said.
If Healey's bill passes, all released prisoners would be assigned to case managers or parole officers, and would be required to get help from the reentry centers.
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Posted by lois at 04:47 PM | Comments (0)
TX: A Zealous Prosecutor of Drug Criminals Becomes One Himself
February 15, 2005 By RALPH BLUMENTHAL, NY Times
PAMPA, Tex., Feb. 9 - No one prosecuted the war on drugs in the Texas Panhandle more zealously than Richard James Roach. As the blustery and hot-tempered Republican district attorney for five counties overrun with methamphetamines, he had eked out an election victory in 2000 vowing a crackdown and was soon gleefully reeling off the harsh sentences he had wrung from juries: 36 years, 38 years, 40 years, 60 years, 75 years - even 99 years. "I think it's quite clear that the good citizens of this district are fed up with drugs," he said.
He had barely missed riding the issue to victory in an earlier race. "My campaign is centered around doing something with the dope dealers," he told a local newspaper in 1996, complaining that "it's kind of hard to fight drugs when you've got dirty law enforcement."
But of all the quarry brought down by drugs in the district's 4,600 square miles of achingly flat oil fields and cattle rangeland northeast of Amarillo, the biggest by far was the stunned figure clapped into handcuffs by F.B.I. agents in the Gray County courthouse here one morning last month: the $101,000-a-year prosecutor himself, Rick Roach.
Even as he was hounding drug offenders into jail, it turned out, Mr. Roach was sinking into his own hell of drug addiction, by his own account stealing methamphetamine and other drugs from police seizures to cope with depression and sexual impotence. Equally astonishing was that his taste for drugs was hardly a secret: it had come to light in two election campaigns.
In a chain of events that Mr. Roach said in an interview "makes absolutely no sense," he injected himself with methamphetamine in the presence of his office secretary, who was secretly working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration and who, he has since learned, was wired with a hidden recorder.
"I just sort of, you might say, went nuts; I made irrational and wrong decisions," he said in several hours of often rambling narrative, part confessional, part defensive, after a reporter knocked on his door with a question on almost everyone's lips in the Panhandle: what could explain his astonishing downfall?
"There's no excuse," he said. "I've gotten what I deserve."
He was ill, he said; drug addiction was an illness, "but there's no defense for taking an illegal substance to treat mental illness."
"Who in their right mind would inject themselves in front of an employee?" he said.
Asked if he was looking to be caught, he replied, "There's some truth to that."
Government officials said they had also been investigating him for pornography and weapons possession - two guns were in his briefcase when he was arrested on Jan. 11, and 35 others were found in his home and office, along with stashes of drugs. Officials also were looking into his handling of millions of dollars in cash confiscated from drug traffickers along the Interstate 40 corridor that skirts the sparsely populated counties of Gray, Wheeler, Roberts, Hemphill and Lipscomb, where only 33,500 people live, fewer than 8 per square mile.
A Guilty Plea
Last Tuesday, in a deal with the United States attorney's office, Mr. Roach pleaded guilty to possessing a firearm while using illegal drugs, a charge that could send him to prison for up to 10 years and carry a fine of $250,000 when he is sentenced in coming months. Three other drug charges were dropped. He also resigned the office to which he had just been elected to a second four-year term.
Some said that given Mr. Roach's turbulent history - hardly a secret from the voters, who seemed perversely forgiving - they were less than shocked. "He's a damned outlaw, he's always been an outlaw; the rules were made for him," said John Mann, a Pampa lawyer and district attorney from 1993 through 2000 who feuded with Mr. Roach, his political archrival and eventual successor.
Now Mr. Roach, 55, is under house arrest, confined to his mother's and stepfather's home in Canyon, an electronic monitoring bracelet signaling the authorities if he strays more than 200 feet beyond the door.
"If I'm ever a prosecutor again, which will never happen," he said, "I would be much less Rambo-ish and more compassionate in the way I handle an offense, particularly for users."
Although some defense lawyers and drug defendants he prosecuted have voiced outrage, officials said it was unlikely that any of Mr. Roach's cases would be overturned merely on the basis of his conviction, without specific evidence of prosecutorial misconduct.
A Rough Road
Mr. Roach's road to the district attorney's office was hardly smooth. He came from nearby Plainview, where his father, Lavern, was a rising star in the boxing world, voted rookie of the year in 1947. On Feb. 22, 1950, his 24th birthday, Lavern Roach was felled in the 10th round of a fight with Georgie Small at St. Nicholas Arena in Manhattan and died in the hospital the next day.
"He had been scheduled to fight Sugar Ray Robinson the next month," said Mr. Roach, fiddling with his father's prize gold ring. His mother remarried, and the family moved to Pampa, the Gray County seat, where Rick went to school and entered the Army, serving in Korea. At Texas Tech University in Lubbock, he studied accounting and earned a law degree.
But he was plagued for years by alcoholism and drug addiction, at times openly, his estranged wife, Cindy, said in a separate interview at the Yellow Rose, a restaurant they once frequented. She said that made it particularly astonishing that he would ever have sought, and been elected to, a top law-enforcement position.
While Mr. Roach was district attorney, his wife said she repeatedly found narcotics and drug paraphernalia in their barn and threw them away. Last year she found a tin of drug crystals in one of his coat pockets, she said.
"I was furious," she said. "He had promised me."
She said she dumped the crystals in the toilet and then confronted her husband. "He said he didn't know what I was talking about," she recounted.
But around the turn of the year, Mrs. Roach said, her husband had come to her distraught. "He thought he had almost overdosed," she recalled. "He had shot something in his arm. He was scared, crying. He never cried. He wanted to come home. He had thrown everything away. If he couldn't come home, he was going to die."
Janet Stone, a bartender at the Pampa Country Club, recalled that on Dec. 30, Mr. Roach was found lying on the floor in the card room, pale and shaking. He later insisted, she said, that someone had spiked his wine.
Mr. Roach disputed the account but said he had indeed come to a decision: "No more illegal substances." On Jan. 3, he showed up at work determined, he said, to apologize to the staff, and "say, 'Sorry, I've been out of it,' and turn over a new leaf."
But that was the day, the F.B.I. said, he injected himself with methamphetamine in front of an employee one more time.
Mr. Roach identified her as his secretary, Rebecca Bailey, and remembered having an uneasy feeling. "I told Becky I felt like something bad was about to happen; I know something's not right," he said.
"No," he said she had responded, "everything's fine."
Mr. Roach's first recorded brush with the law, according to a Lubbock police record, was in 1975, when he was arrested on charges of drunken driving and using abusive racial language. The charges were later dismissed. He was working in the town of Canadian when he and Cindy met, and they married in 1980. Their relationship was stormy from the outset, she said. "He drank a lot" and sometimes smoked marijuana, she said. She left him in 1987, filing for divorce, only to withdraw the papers because, she said, by then they had three boys, including twins.
Descent Into Drugs
In 1988, while they were living in Breckenridge, between Fort Worth and Abilene, he showed signs of drug use, Mrs. Roach said. Once, she said, he drove to Plainview and begged a relative to fly him to Lubbock "because he thought an ambulance was chasing him." He finally checked himself into a treatment center, she said.
Mr. Roach said he had suffered from depression since he was 13 and underwent treatments with a medicine chest of drugs, some self-prescribed and, recently, ordered over the Internet. "They were all debilitating on my libido, which created problems with my wife," he said. Viagra, he said, left him with a splitting headache. He said that in Breckenridge he had started injecting methamphetamine, finding eventually that, mixed with the sexual enhancer Levitra, it had the desired effect.
"I was going to patent it," he said with a hollow laugh. "I'm definitely a mixed-up person."
He said the pornographic images reported on his office computer had popped up unbidden, and that once he replied to be taken off the list to receive them, the solicitations multiplied. He said he had not stolen seized drug money or maintained an arsenal, describing the weapons as heirlooms and collectors' pieces.
Mr. Roach's first campaign for district attorney came in 1996. At the time he was the Roberts County attorney, prosecuting misdemeanor cases at $500 a month. His opponent, Mr. Mann, won the race by 500 votes and according to Mrs. Roach, the loss plunged her husband into depression.
It was a hard fought race, with a zesty local weekly, The Canadian Record, printing reports of Mr. Roach's drug abuse and legal problems.
Four years later Mr. Roach beat Mr. Mann by 6 votes in a Republican primary marred by charges of fraud, and then beat him again - by 21 votes - after a court ordered a new election. He went on to win the general election.
Mr. Mann said the voters were chiefly swayed by Mr. Roach's highly popular family, particularly his stepfather, Weldon Trice, a beloved high school football coach.
Mrs. Roach said their lives slid badly downhill in late 2003. She found glass smoking or snorting implements, foil packets with a burn hole, and white powder and a razor blade in their barn and spied on her husband sniffing something.
Mr. Roach said of his downfall, "It just presented itself."
He said that in July 2004 he had come across a glass pipe that Texas troopers had overlooked in searching a seized car. "A girl called it a crack pipe, so I assumed there was crack in it," he said. He took it home. "I happened to be having a bad day, so I smoked it in the barn," he said.
Soon after, he said, he found another stash of overlooked drugs. "I just remember how ecstatic I was when I found it," he recalled. He used that, too.
On Dec. 16, the F.B.I. said in affidavits for search warrants, one of Mr. Roach's employees found a syringe floating in the toilet of the office bathroom. Tests showed it contained residue of methamphetamine.
On. Dec. 20, Dec. 31 and Jan. 3, the F.B.I. said, he was seen by an unnamed witness injecting methamphetamine.
The only one who could have seen him, Mr. Roach said, was Ms. Bailey, who later went public as the named complainant in the lawsuit to remove him from office. Ms. Bailey, at her desk in the district attorney's office, did not dispute it, saying, "He trusted me." She declined to say more until the sentencing.
Mrs. Roach voiced no interest in a reconciliation but at one point sounded wistful. "He told me, 'There are some things you don't know about me,' " she recalled. "I wasn't patient. I should have shut up and listened."
At his parents' house, Mr. Roach stepped outside the house for a cigarette. He had been pronounced addiction-free at a Dallas treatment facility he was sent to after his arrest, he said, but still needed his nicotine. Smoking is banned in prison, he reflected bleakly. He should give it up, he said, but added that now "is not a good time to give up anything."
If he is sentenced to prison, he said, he does not know where he will end up, but that no place will be much good.
"Prosecutors don't do well in the pen," he said.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Posted by lois at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)
February 14, 2005
KY 39% agree that prisons should be cut
"The poll found little variation among respondents on most questions, taking into account income levels, education and whether they were from urban or rural Kentucky.
The poll found the highest support for a great deal or a fair amount of cuts to state prisons (39 percent), state courts (38 percent), business development programs (36 percent) and parks and tourism (33 percent)."
Options draw little enthusiasm
Deborah Yetter, The Courier-Journal
Kentuckians overwhelmingly oppose cuts in funding for public schools, Medicaid and health insurance for teachers and state employees, according to The Courier-Journal's latest Bluegrass Poll.
And even if lawmakers must cut programs to balance the state budget, a majority of those surveyed were still hesitant to cut other areas. Most said they favored "only a little" in cuts or none at all to state parks, prisons, courts and business development.
Ninety-two percent would either oppose cuts in schools or favor only a little; 89 percent in Medicaid; and 85 percent in public employee health insurance. Smaller majorities opposed any cuts or favored only a little in higher education (81 percent) and state police (84 percent).
The newspaper interviewed 801 people for the poll conducted Feb. 3-9. Its margin of error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. Percentages are rounded and may not total 100 percent.
Sherita Lynch, 26, of Radcliff, a poll respondent who agreed to a follow-up interview, said she believes it's especially important that the state not cut education or Medicaid, the federal-state health plan for the poor, disabled and low-income elderly in nursing homes.
Some programs, she said, "could probably use an overhaul. But I don't think education or health care should be one of them."
Lynch, who described herself as a smoker and a drinker, said she doesn't oppose a tax increase on tobacco or a new one on alcohol to help avoid cuts. "I'm definitely open to generating more revenue," she said.
Some lawmakers struggling to devise a budget said the poll's findings reflect what they're hearing -- people don't like cuts to services even though many don't want to pay increased taxes.
"Everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die," said state Rep. Steve Nunn, R-Glasgow, who recently renounced an anti-tax-increase pledge he signed in 1990. "Without more revenue, we're going to continue to cut services and programs that nobody wants to cut."
Nunn is among some lawmakers who oppose Gov. Ernie Fletcher's "revenue-neutral" tax-overhaul proposal as not being adequate to meet needs, especially in the area of human services. Fletcher has said that while his plan would raise some taxes, it lowers others, making it "revenue neutral."
Lola Billings, 62, of Fern Creek, a poll respondent and retired teaching assistant, said she strongly opposes any cuts to education or Medicaid -- which helps provide health care for poor children.
"I don't think they should cut any of that," she said. "They seem to have money for everything except what we really need it for."
Billings said she isn't sure about paying more taxes but she added: "I don't think they should cut taxes any more. They've been cut enough."
Fletcher's proposal provides flat funding or slight increases for many public school programs but offers additional money in areas of teacher recruitment and training and early reading initiatives.
Of poll respondents who are parents of Kentucky public school children, 89 percent were opposed to any cuts in primary and secondary education programs.
Fletcher is proposing a significant increase for Medicaid over the next 17 months to deal with the program's chronic budget shortfalls; his budget seeks $254 million to attract another $578 million in federal money.
Administration officials say they want to avoid cutting anyone from Medicaid, which serves nearly 700,000 Kentuckians.
The poll found little variation among respondents on most questions, taking into account income levels, education and whether they were from urban or rural Kentucky.
The poll found the highest support for a great deal or a fair amount of cuts to state prisons (39 percent), state courts (38 percent), business development programs (36 percent) and parks and tourism (33 percent).
Nunn said he's not sure people would be so supportive if the state actually cuts those programs. "The reality hasn't sunk in to most people," he said.
http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050213/NEWS0104/
502130482/1008
Posted by lois at 05:39 PM | Comments (0)
The Ledger, Lakeland, FL: Prisons Not Only Answer to Crime
February 12, 2005
Editorial
..."Corrections has become a $2 billion-a-year enterprise in Florida. And the fact that the state Department of Corrections wants to increase its bed capacity to 91,165 this year, at an additional cost of $125 million, is a terrible indictment of Florida's failure to combat crime by investing in better early child care and youth services, education, family intervention, drug treatment, counseling and job training."
It is a perplexing enigma of our times: Why is it that crime rates have been dropping for years, and, yet, our prison system continues to grow and grow? The obvious answer is that tough laws that crack down on offenders and take them off the streets for many years are responsible for decreasing crime rates. There is truth in that. People prone to committing crimes have considerably less opportunity if they're behind bars.
But that presupposes that new generations will produce as many or more criminals as in the past, making it necessary to accommodate an ever-expanding prison population. Clearly, more needs to be done to keep people from becoming criminals -- and candidates for Florida's prison system
-- early.
Corrections has become a $2 billion-a-year enterprise in Florida. And the fact that the state Department of Corrections wants to increase its bed capacity to 91,165 this year, at an additional cost of $125 million, is a terrible indictment of Florida's failure to combat crime by investing in better early child care and youth services, education, family intervention, drug treatment, counseling and job training.
The DOC is asking the Legislature to increase bed capacity at prisons in Columbia, Marion, Taylor, Wakulla and Union counties this year. And it wants to build a brand-new prison in Suwannee County, one that will eventually cost $82.9 million and house more than 2,000 prisoners.
The Suwannee facility, when completed, will provide 305 jobs and a payroll of nearly $14 million a year to that rural county. And perhaps that's yet another reason for the unchecked growth of Florida's correctional empire -- it has become as much an economic-development tool as a crime suppressant. It is not for nothing that U.S. 90, as it winds its way through rural North Florida, is called the "Avenue of Incarceration."
A prison system that is within spitting distance of reaching 100,000 beds is a gigantic monument to Florida's failures. Recidivism rates in Florida's prisons are approaching 50 percent. Because the emphasis is on incarceration, rehabilitation is given short shrift. Of the nearly $50 a day spent housing an inmate, only about $1 is spent on education.
Warehousing human beings is not a long-term solution to fighting crime. Strategies and programs that address the root causes of crime are ultimately more costefficient and more humane public policies. Instead of continually expanding the prison system, state lawmakers should be exploring ways to shrink it.
Investing billions of dollars a year to warehouse human beings while skimping on rehabilitation and programs that can truly address the root causes of crime is short-sighted public policy. More and more, Florida prisons are becoming large-scale AIDS wards, holding pens for the mentally ill and enforced retirement homes for elderly inmates who can never be released because of inflexible "three strikes" sentencing laws. It does our society no credit that America's incarceration rates outpace those of nearly every other industrialized nation in the world. And the need for jobs in rural counties notwithstanding, prisons are not the answer to economic development.
If the Suwannee prison is built, just four of Florida's 67 counties will lack state correctional facilities. Is that really a winning strategy to fight crime?
http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050212/NEWS/502120327/
1036>
Posted by lois at 05:35 PM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2005
Lynne Stewart to Appeal Terrorism Conviction
For more information on Lynne Stewart go to www.LynnStewart.org
``It's a dark day for civil liberties and for civil liberties lawyers in this country,'' attorney Ron Kuby said Thursday. ``In the post 9-11 era, where dissidents are treated as traitors, it's perhaps no surprise that a zealous civil rights lawyer becomes a convict.''
Posted by lois at 09:53 PM | Comments (0)
Torture: American Style
February 11, 2005, NY Times
By Bob Herbert
Saher Arar is a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. On Sept. 26, 2002, as he was returning from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities at Kennedy Airport in New York, where he was in the process of changing planes.
Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was not charged with a crime. But, as Jane Mayer tells us in a compelling and deeply disturbing article in the current issue of The New Yorker, he "was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet."
Saher Arar is a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. On Sept. 26, 2002, as he was returning from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities at Kennedy Airport in New York, where he was in the process of changing planes.
Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was not charged with a crime. But, as Jane Mayer tells us in a compelling and deeply disturbing article in the current issue of The New Yorker, he "was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet."
In an instant, Mr. Arar was swept into an increasingly common nightmare, courtesy of the United States of America. The plane that took off with him from Kennedy "flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan."
Any rights Mr. Arar might have thought he had, either as a Canadian citizen or a human being, had been left behind. At times during the trip, Mr. Arar heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of "the Special Removal Unit." He was being taken, on the orders of the U.S. government, to Syria, where he would be tortured.
The title of Ms. Mayer's article is "Outsourcing Torture." It's a detailed account of the frightening and extremely secretive U.S. program known as "extraordinary rendition."
This is one of the great euphemisms of our time. Extraordinary rendition is the name that's been given to the policy of seizing individuals without even the semblance of due process and sending them off to be interrogated by regimes known to practice torture. In terms of bad behavior, it stands side by side with contract killings.
Our henchmen in places like Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Jordan are torturing terror suspects at the behest of a nation - the United States - that just went through a national election in which the issue of moral values was supposed to have been decisive. How in the world did we become a country in which gays' getting married is considered an abomination, but torture is O.K.?
As Ms. Mayer pointed out: "Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American agents, then forced onto a Gulfstream V jet, like the one described by Arar. ... Upon arriving in foreign countries, rendered suspects often vanish. Detainees are not provided with lawyers, and many families are not informed of their whereabouts."
Mr. Arar was seized because his name had turned up on a watch list of terror suspects. He was reported to have been a co-worker of a man in Canada whose brother was a suspected terrorist.
"Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say," Ms. Mayer wrote.
The confession under torture was worthless. Syrian officials reported back to the United States that they could find no links between Mr. Arar and terrorism. He was released in October 2003 without ever being charged and is now back in Canada.
Barbara Olshansky is the assistant legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing Mr. Arar in a lawsuit against the U.S. I asked her to describe Mr. Arar's physical and emotional state following his release from custody.
She sounded shaken by the memory. "He's not a big guy," she said. "He had lost more than 40 pounds. His pallor was terrible, and his eyes were sunken. He looked like someone who was kind of dead inside."
Any government that commits, condones, promotes or fosters torture is a malignant force in the world. And those who refuse to raise their voices against something as clearly evil as torture are enablers, if not collaborators.
There is a widespread but mistaken notion in the U.S. that everybody seized by the government in its so-called war on terror is in fact somehow connected to terrorist activity. That is just wildly wrong.
Tony Blair knows a little about that sort of thing. Just two days ago the British prime minister formally apologized to 11 people who were wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for bombings in England by the Irish Republican Army three decades ago.
Jettisoning the rule of law to permit such acts of evil as kidnapping and torture is not a defensible policy for a civilized nation. It's wrong. And nothing good can come from it.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Posted by lois at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)
Report: Thousands wrongly convicted each year
USA Today 2-11-05
WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands of suspects unable to afford lawyers are wrongly convicted each year because they are pressured to accept guilty pleas or have incompetent attorneys, the American Bar Association says in a report.
The study by a committee of the nation's largest lawyers' group says that legal representation of indigents is in "a state of crisis." These defendants are at constant risk of wrongful conviction and unjust punishment, including the death penalty, according to the study being released Friday.
"The fundamental right to a lawyer that Americans assume apply to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the United States," the study states. "All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights."
The ABA committee wants Congress and local governments to spend more money and create oversight groups to guard against shoddy legal representation. Judges also are asked to be more vigilant in ensuring defendants have competent counsel.
It has been more than 40 years since the Supreme Court ruled the government must provide legal counsel to indigent defendants who are charged with serious crimes.
The report comes one week after President Bush called for more training for lawyers who represent accused killers and greater use of DNA testing. That proposal is not on the agenda at the ABA winter meeting in Salt Lake City, which runs through Tuesday.
The ABA study points to people like Brandon Moon of Kansas City, Mo., who served nearly 17 years for the rape of an El Paso, woman before DNA tests determined he was not responsible; and Ryan Matthews, a Louisiana man who sat on death row for five years before he was exonerated.
More than 150 people who were convicted in 31 states and the District of Columbia served a total of 1,800 years in prison for crimes they did not commit. All were exonerated due to DNA evidence.
"The challenge is coming up with politically viable ways to fix the problem," said Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University who tracks death penalty cases. "The long-term costs of underfunding defense counsel are hard to see when a state is facing budget crises.
"Needless to say, criminals or accused criminals are not a very powerful lobby or a group that particularly draws sympathy for more dollars and cents," Berman said.
The report also pointed to negligent or otherwise unprepared lawyers, leading to faulty convictions or more serious punishment. No formal training existed for lawyers for the indigent in Louisiana, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas, which puts more people to death than any other state.
In the majority of states surveyed, money for prosecutors outpaced public defenders. For example, California allocates defense counsel an average of $60.90 for every $100 the prosecution receives.
In the South, the report cited a problem of "meet 'em and plead 'em lawyers" where lawyers in states such as Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia often negotiate a plea agreement the first day they meet their clients.
In Texas, Rhode Island and elsewhere, legal experts reported incdances where indigent clients languished in jail for months without access to a lawyer or were improperly urged by prosecutors to accept plea deals without a lawyer present.
The report recommends that:
_states provide money for public defenders that is on par with prosecutors.
_states establish oversight organizations to police potential abuses such as forced plea agreements or otherwise negligent or inadequate counsel.
_lawyers refuse new cases if workloads are so excessive that id would substantially impair their defense preparation.
_judges report prosecutors who seek to obtain waivers of counsel and guilty pleas that are not voluntary and on the record.
The study was based on research and testimony gathered from 22 states. The states are: Alabama, California, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Posted by lois at 09:42 PM | Comments (0)
February 10, 2005
WA: Bills would let some with 3 strikes be released after 15 years
By TRACY JOHNSON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER, Wednesday, February 9, 2005
The cost of locking away less-violent criminals for life has spurred proposed changes to Washington's "Three Strikes" law that would give some of those prisoners the unexpected chance to walk free someday.
Prisoners whose three "strike" convictions don't include any Class A felonies -- the most serious crimes under state law -- would be able to ask for release after serving 15 years.
It's a proposal that prosecutors and even the conservative radio talk-show host who wrote the state's Three Strikes law say they could, with a few added tweaks of their own, accept.
"At some point, when a guy is well past his prime and has served a good long time ... you have to consider whether keeping him in jail is worth the expense," said Sen. Adam Kline, the Seattle Democrat who is sponsoring the proposed legislation.
Defense attorneys say Kline's bill doesn't go far enough, although they've long been pushing for changes to a law they say gives prosecutors too much power and unfairly sends away non-violent offenders forever.
Ramona Brandes, a member of the Washington Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' legislative action committee, said the bill "is a small step in the right direction."
She said shoplifting or a "till tap" -- grabbing cash when a store clerk opens the register -- becomes second-degree robbery, a "strike," when an unarmed offender hits or even shoves the clerk in a panicked effort to get away.
"The persistent offender law we have right now is very onerous, in that it does not allow judges to take a person's particular circumstances into account," Brandes said. "It's life, no matter how minor the incident is."
Of roughly 200 prisoners who have been given life sentences under the Three Strikes law, 38 have no Class A felony convictions and would be eligible -- starting with six of them in 2010 -- to ask for release under the proposal, according to the state Sentencing Guidelines Commission.
A Superior Court judge would decide whether to release a Three Strikes prisoner to community supervision after considering whether the person is dangerous, among other factors.
Prisoners who are denied release could ask again every two years.
Under the current law, people who are convicted of three separate "most serious offenses" get a life sentence with no chance of ever being released -- aside from clemency that no governor has yet given a Three Strikes inmate.
Class A felonies include murder, first-degree assault, first- or second-degree rape, first-degree child molesting and other serious, violent crimes. But some Class B or C felonies are also strikes, including second-degree assault and, the most common strike offense by far, second-degree robbery.
For several years, Kline has proposed removing second-degree robbery from the list of offenses that count as strikes. He has proposed it again this year, although he said his other Three Strikes bill has a far greater chance of passing.
He said he devised it not because he thinks that people with only Class B felony convictions are necessarily less violent than those with Class A convictions, but mainly to gain the support of state prosecutors.
Kline said criminals, no matter what crimes they committed in their younger days, generally become less dangerous as they age, while health problems often make them much more expensive to house in prison than the typical $26,000 a year.
Prosecutors have made it clear that they would not support removing second-degree robbery, an idea that would immediately free about 50 three-strike prisoners and release almost 40 more as they complete the standard sentences for their most recent strikes in the coming years.
Russ Hauge, president of the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, said taking second-degree robbery off the list of strike offenses "goes too far away from the intent" of the Three Strikes initiative, passed by Washington voters in 1993.
"You have to draw the line somewhere. The initiative drew it," said Hauge, the Kitsap County prosecutor. "We have not seen really grave injustices that cry out for reform. ... It's not like we're sending people to prison for life for stealing a pizza, as has happened in some other jurisdictions."
He also said having to sentence that many offenders a second time would "break the financial back of the counties."
But prosecutors wouldn't stand in the way of letting those who have committed only Class B and C felonies have their chance at freedom with one condition -- that none of those felonies are sex offenses, according to Hauge.
Prosecutors would also prefer that the minimum prison term before the chance of release be 20 years, not 15.
John Carlson, who wrote the original Three Strikes initiative and is host of an afternoon talk show on KVI-AM radio, said he doesn't see any need for change but proposes a trade-off. He said that if lawmakers would add two crimes, residential burglary and methamphetamine production, to the list of strikes, "then the Class B felony idea would be much easier to live with."
"When you've had a law on the books for a dozen years, it's certainly appropriate to revisit it -- perhaps strengthen it and improve its efficiency and effectiveness," Carlson said.
Residential burglary and methamphetamine production are Class B felonies. But Carlson believes both are serious crimes, and a conviction on either ought to qualify as a strike.
Kline said he would not support adding those crimes to the list of strikes. He still favors removing second-degree robbery as a strike, and so do defense lawyers and the Sentencing Guidelines Commission, of which Kline is a member.
Commission Executive Director Ida Leggett said the commission's support of making second-degree robbery a strike no longer comes strictly from the policy perspective of "not incarcerating people who are not violent for the rest of their lives."
Brandes, a public defender who handles Three Strike cases in King County, said she would like to see both of Kline's proposed changes pass. She said many second-degree robberies are fueled by drug or alcohol addictions: people who are under the influence at the time or are desperate for money to feed their habit and aren't out to hurt anyone.
She said it makes no sense to punish those offenders to the same degree as Gary Ridgway, who admitted to killing 48 women, instead of trying to treat the drug problem that's driving them to commit crimes.
Neither of Klein's proposals would offer a reprieve for bank robbers -- even those who use notes and no weapons -- because lawmakers bumped up the crime from second-degree to first-degree robbery a few years ago.
WHAT BILLS WOULD DO
To learn more about the proposed changes in the "Three Strikes" law, go to www1.leg.wa.gov/legislature.">www1.leg.wa.gov/legislature.
Senate Bill 5760 would give prisoners without any convictions of Class A felonies the chance of release from prison.
Senate Bill 5284 would remove a conviction of second-degree robbery as a strike.
P-I reporter Tracy Johnson can be reached at 206-448-8169 or tracyjohnson@seattlepi.com
© 1998-2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/211317_threestrikes09.html
Posted by lois at 04:41 PM | Comments (0)
February 09, 2005
Bedford Hills: The Ending of the Rockefeller Drug Penalties Is Not an Open Door
February 9, 2005
By LESLIE EATON
BEDFORD HILLS, N.Y. - If any group of prison inmates has attracted public sympathy, it was the women whose first brush with the law left them locked up here for 15 years or more on drug charges.
Few newspaper articles or television reports about New York's Rockefeller-era drug laws were complete without a visit to the state's only maximum security prison for women, for an interview with an inmate longing to go home to her family.
But the much-heralded changes to the drug laws that took effect last month will free at most 10 of those women, and probably fewer than that, in the near term. The new law does not allow them to challenge their convictions, but it does reduce mandatory sentences that critics said were longer than those meted out to some murderers.
While the new drug laws have pleased some women in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, where all 10 of those women are held, there is also disappointment here that so few of the prison's 850 inmates will be going home.
One of those likely to be freed, Brenda Prather of Rochester, described the feelings of her fellow inmates this way: "They're happy that I'm leaving. But they're crying inside. Because they're missing me and at the same time they're wishing it was them. It's really sad."
Experts say a range of factors explain why so few women - at most 1 percent of the female drug-crime inmates - are likely to benefit from the change. They include limits to the revisions, the makeup of the prison population, the focus of the governor's clemency program and the complexity of the cases that landed some of the women in prison.
Some advocates of prison reform say that by publicizing the most egregious cases, and focusing on the most seemingly sympathetic prisoners, they may have inadvertently limited the assistance for the vast majority of women jailed on drug charges.
"A little, we got hoisted on our own petard," said Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a privately funded prison oversight group that has been active in the effort to reform the Rockefeller-era laws. "It was too handy a tool, too obvious a tool to make your case."
Women are not representative of the overall prison population; they account for fewer than 5 percent of those held in New York State prisons, according to data from the state's Department of Correctional Services. A slightly larger percentage of low-level drug offenders are women, about 7 percent.
But of the prisoners sentenced on the most serious drug charges, the A-1 felonies, only about 2 percent - 10 out of 446 - are women. Their number was higher a few years ago, but it has been reduced both by Gov. George E. Pataki's clemency grants and by fairly recent changes that allow top-level drug prisoners to apply for parole earlier than in the past if they participate in special programs.
And it is the top-level felons who received the most dramatic help under the revisions to the drug laws, which Governor Pataki signed in December.
The new legislation shortens the sentences for the most serious drug sale or possession crimes to between 8 and 25 years, from a mandatory minimum of 15 years to life. The new law also allows prisoners convicted of those top-level felonies under the old system to apply to courts for resentencing.
But judges may not be sympathetic toward female inmates with, for example, poor prison records, while in other cases district attorneys may object to drastic reductions. At least two of the women still in Bedford Hills fled before their trials; one violated the terms of her parole, and the other was a parole officer when she was arrested on charges of selling cocaine to someone who worked in her office.
And some, like Shanaye Hughley, may not have served enough time to win release even under a reduced sentence. Ms. Hughley, 22, was sentenced last year to 15 years to life; prosecutors said she profited from a family-run drug operation in a public housing project in Queens.
She is appealing her conviction. Although she had agreed to talk to a reporter, prison officials said she was confined to her quarters because of a rule violation.
Other inmates have such tangled pasts that it was unclear what might happen if and when they ask for new sentences. One is Severiana Jacquez, whose case is "an enigma in a jigsaw in a puzzle," said Randy Credico, director of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, which plans to represent her in court.
Ms. Jacquez, 52, was sentenced in absentia to 17 years to life in 1991. Prosecutors said that more than 11 ounces of cocaine had been found in her room, along with her daughter, Jennifer, then 4 years old. Ms. Jacquez fled before the trial and was not arrested until 2001, when she tried to recover some of the money posted for her bail.
In an interview in a conference room here, Ms. Jacquez insisted in rapid and vehement Spanish that the drugs were not hers. So why didn't she fight the charges in court? She said she had received bad legal advice, which included being told that her witnesses could be arrested and that she should simply leave the courthouse and never come back.
Another complicating factor was the fate of her daughter, which might trouble the court. The police said she had endangered the child by leaving her alone in the home with drugs. She denies that was the case. But when Ms. Jacquez was arrested in 2001, Jennifer was left to fend for herself, at age 15. Jennifer said recently that she lived alone in her mother's apartment, though the electricity was turned off and she was ultimately evicted.
From prison, Ms. Jacquez eventually found help for her daughter through Hour Children, a program for the children of women in or released from prison, which has given Jennifer a job and a place to live. "Even though she's in there," Jennifer said, "she's been a good mom."
Now that her daughter is doing better, Ms. Jacquez said she was less despondent; she has been wearing makeup and, this day, coral nail polish. And the changes in the drug laws have given her hope.
But she has served less than four years. And even if she does get out of prison, she may be forced to return to the Dominican Republic, which she left in 1979.
The office of New York City's special narcotics prosecutor said that it had not yet seen a motion from Ms. Jacquez. The office is reviewing 24 it has received from eligible inmates, said Magda Gandasegui, a spokewoman.
It has also received more than 30 motions by lower-level inmates who are not eligible for resentencing, she said, and other prosecutors report similar requests.
Though they may be disappointed about resentencing, these inmates do benefit from the new law, said Chauncey G. Parker, director of criminal justice for the state. It increases the amount of time that can be deducted from their prison sentences if they participate in education, drug-treatment and similar programs.
George W. Conaty Jr., who is representing Ms. Prather, the Rochester woman, said he had already been in touch with the Monroe County district attorney's office about a resentencing. A lawyer there, Thomas J. Brilbeck, said the office was working through about 50 resentencing requests, including Ms. Prather's.
Her case is more straightforward than Ms. Jacquez's. After a trial, she received 40 years in prison - later reduced to 20 by an appeals court - for helping her husband with his drug business. She denies that, but says she knew he was selling drugs; he pleaded guilty and was released from prison last May, after 10 years.
During the decade she has been in prison, Ms. Prather, 49, not only got a high school equivalency degree, she also recently earned a bachelor's degree in sociology. Though a reporter's visit came as a surprise to her, she spoke eloquently about her years in prison and her plans for her life when she returns to Rochester.
She is already packing her things and shipping them home to her five children, one of whom was only 2 years old when she left for prison. Now he is 13, and she is trying to get herself ready for a new life with him and his adult siblings (though not with the man she says got her into all of this).
And she has a list of dishes she wants to cook for her family when she gets home: lasagna, pork roast, chitterlings, collard greens, macaroni and cheese and potato salad will all be on the menu, because each of them is a relative's favorite, she said.
And for dessert, she will ask for her own favorite: peach cobbler, made by her mother.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Posted by lois at 04:57 PM | Comments (0)
February 08, 2005
Some with felony convictions in IL may have records sealed
By Mike Riopell Daily Herald Staff Writer
Posted Tuesday, February 08, 2005
SPRINGFIELD - Soon, some felons might have an easier time finding a job after they've served their time in prison.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed a new law Monday that allows some felons to seal their records so potential employers can't see them.
The new law addresses convictions for Class 4 felony drug abuse and prostitution after going through a petition process. It takes effect June 1.
"I am very happy that the governor is willing to give people who made a mistake in their past a second chance for employment," said state Sen. John Cullerton, a Chicago Democrat and sponsor of the proposal.
But it may be more than a second chance, said critics.
"There's an importance in trying to keep younger people from having felony convictions because it affects them later in life," said Lake County State's Attorney Michael Waller. "But in my experience in Lake County, individuals with these kinds of convictions have had multiple run-ins with the law."
Waller said the drug convictions covered by the law are relatively minor but are usually handed down after multiple offenses. Under the law, offenders with more than one felony cannot seal their records.
In any case, law enforcement authorities may still access the records, and so can employers, such as schools, who are required by law to check backgrounds.
People seeking to seal drug records must pass a drug test within a month of the request, and authorities can protest the sealing. Applicants also must wait at least three years after the conviction.
"It's a lengthy process," said Gerardo Cardenas, a Blagojevich spokesman. "It's not like you get out of jail ... and it's automatic. There's a process there."
Last year, Blagojevich approved a law allowing people to seal misdemeanor records following similar provisions.
Posted by lois at 06:59 PM | Comments (0)
N.Y. Using Terrorism Law To Prosecute Street Gang
By Michelle Garcia Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, February 1, 2005
The newest face of an alleged terrorist wears a goatee,stands about five feet tall, dresses in baggy clothes and resides in the Bronx. Gang member Edgar Morales, aka "Puebla," has the distinction of becoming one of the first people ever charged under New York's state
terrorism laws.
The Bronx district attorney has accused members of the St. James Boys street gang of shootings "committed with the intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population." The other charges include murder,
attempted murder, various weapons charges and assault. But prosecutors have not alleged that the gang is connected to any terrorist network.
"The terror perpetrated by gangs, which all too often occurs on the streets of New York, also fits squarely within the scope of this statute," said District Attorney Robert T. Johnson.
When members were arrested, Police Commissioner Raymond
W. Kelly said the gang "terrorized" the community
surrounding St. James Park, the neighborhood park from
which the gang takes its name.
But civil libertarians and some terrorism experts say
the case -- now underway in New York State Supreme
Court -- is a misuse of state laws and should raise
concern about what they consider is an ever-expanding definition of the term "terrorism."
Jameel Jaffer, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said that prosecuting the St. James Boys was not what most Americans envisioned when state legislators passed anti-terrorism bills.
"They didn't think of gang members in inner cities,
drug crimes, non-security" crimes, Jaffer said. "It's
not what people had in mind."
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 36 states
added terrorism-related laws to their criminal codes,
using them to enhance sentences that, in some cases,
will now include the death penalty, according to the
National Conference of State Legislatures.
Most of the new laws focus on heinous crimes such as
murder and kidnapping.
"Probably most of the crimes could have been prosecuted before," said Blake Harrison, a lawyer with the legislatures group. "Enacting these laws makes it a little easier to effect the same goal."
But the new laws also provide prosecutors with new opportunities. Once on the books, the laws can be applied to various crimes if prosecutors believe they can make them stick. It has happened before.
Anti-racketeering laws, for example, were created to
combat mobsters but are now frequently used in drug and corporate-corruption cases.
"Language is plastic," said Gregory Mark, a former
prosecutor who is now a legal historian at Rutgers
University. "As new situations arise and the
imagination of prosecutors is stimulated, the statutes
which were clearly intended for one purpose are
expanded."
In Virginia, state prosecutors brought terrorism
charges against the now-convicted Washington area
snipers Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad, in part
because investigators could not pinpoint which man
pulled the trigger. Virginia's Supreme Court is
expected to rule soon on the constitutionality of the
state's terrorism laws.
The case against the St. James Boys began in 2002 with
the shooting of 10-year-old Malenny Mendez. Shortly
after midnight, Malenny and family friends left a
christening party. A street fight broke out between the
St. James Boys and another group of men. Shots rang
out; the men ran. Malenny fell to the ground, a bullet
lodged in her brain. She died several hours later.
At the time, police said the alleged shooter had fled
to Mexico. Prosecutors accused Morales of hiding the
gun. But he was convicted only of criminal trespass and
was sentenced to time served and probation.
Bronx prosecutors have relaunched the murder case as
part of a broader 70-count indictment against the gang
that was unsealed last May. It named 19 defendants,
charging all of them with terrorism for gang-related
activity.
Earlier this month, Morales's attorney, Lewis Alperin,
argued in a Bronx courtroom that the definition of
terrorism was too expansive. "You put the key in the
door and you know what happens: Any protester who takes
a position [against the government] will be prosecuted
under the terrorism law."
The judge is scheduled to listen to further arguments
March 9 before deciding whether to permit the terrorism
charges in the case.
New York's anti-terrorism law was born as a response to
the 2001 attacks and a public clamor for action. Within
a week of the attacks, the state legislature and Gov.
George E. Pataki (R) approved terrorism legislation
that they hailed as the toughest in the country.
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan)
characterized the bill as "overkill," even as he voted
for it.
Silver predicted at the time that the law would be a
purely symbolic gesture. "Will there be a prosecution
under the state terrorist act?" he asked. "I don't
think so."
But terrorism expert Jessica Stern said New York and
other states adopted terrorism laws that contained
vague and open-ended language that allows the term to
easily slip from its original meaning.
"Now we are seeing the possibility that it can be used
by the government to go after people we wouldn't think
of as terrorists," said Stern, a lecturer at Harvard University. "It's so often an epithet for the person we want to incarcerate [or] extradite."
Outside the Bronx courtroom, Morales's parents said
prosecutors overreached with the terrorism charges in a desperate attempt to win a conviction in the little girl's shooting.
The couple says that if prosecutors simply brought
criminal charges against Edgar they would accept the
fate, but the terrorism label horrifies them. They
worry about the stigma the family might suffer if Edgar
is convicted for terrorism, and the effect on their
jobs and future.
"Sometimes I wonder when people see us walking down the street," said Morales's stepfather, Inocencio Hernandez. "Do they say, ' There goes the parents of Edgar' or 'the parents of a terrorist' ?"
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52504-2005Jan31.html?sub=AR
Posted by lois at 06:33 PM | Comments (0)
GEO Private Prison Company Provides 60 Scholarships to Children of Incarcerated Parents
PR Newswire US
February 7, 2005
Unmitigated gall!
The GEO Group, Inc. Joins Forces With Take Stock in Children to Serve Children of Prisoners
BOCA RATON, Fla. Feb. 7
BOCA RATON, Fla., Feb. 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The GEO Group, Inc.
(NYSE:GGI) ("GEO") announced today that it has joined forces with Take Stock in Children as a sponsoring partner of "Children of Prisoners: Children of Promise," a mentoring initiative serving children of incarcerated parents across the state of Florida. GEO has pledged a yearly contribution of $100,000 to the initiative for the next five years. George C. Zoley, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of GEO has also joined the Board of Directors of Take Stock in Children.
GEO's contribution will help provide scholarships and mentoring services to more than 60 students in the state of Florida over the next five years. "Children of Prisoners: Children of Promise" is a public-private partnership of the Florida Governor's Mentoring Initiative, Take Stock in Children, the Florida Department of Corrections, and Prison Fellowship Ministries. The middle and high school students, who are selected to participate in the program, make a pledge to remain drug- and crime-free, maintain good grades and attendance, and meet with a mentor on a weekly basis. Upon fulfillment of their pledge, these students will receive a full college tuition scholarship.
George C. Zoley, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of GEO, said, "We are delighted to be a new partner in this very valuable effort to help children of incarcerated parents across the state of Florida. For over twenty years, we have been setting higher standards in the delivery of our services and have been providing new hope for those in our care through innovative rehabilitation programs. With this contribution, we extend our commitment to provide new hope to the children of incarcerated parents.
"By pledging to help these children gain access to a college education and by providing them with mentors and role model figures, we will go a long way in ensuring that they enjoy a bright and prosperous future," Zoley added.
Take Stock in Children is an award-winning non-profit organization dedicated to providing scholarships, mentors and hope to Florida's underprivileged youth. The program offers a comprehensive plan of success for selected students -- who must sign a contract to stay in school, maintain good grades and meet once a week with a mentor. In turn, Take Stock in Children provides each student with a four-year tuition scholarship to college. It is a solution to overcoming child poverty, academic failure and youth crime. Since 1996, Take Stock in Children has impacted the lives of more than 10,000 deserving students in the state of Florida.
GEO is a world leader in the delivery of correctional and detention management, health and mental health, and other diversified services to federal, state, and local government agencies around the globe. GEO offers a turnkey approach that includes design, construction, financing, and operations. GEO represents government clients in the United States, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and Canada managing 42 facilities with a total design capacity of approximately 37,000 beds.
Posted by lois at 06:27 PM | Comments (0)
National Priorities Project: Breakdown of Bush's Budget
National Priorities Project Bulletin
*****************************************************************
On Monday, February 7, 2005, the Bush Administration sent to Congress its budget request for Fiscal Year 2006. In total, discretionary federal grants to state and local governments would be cut by almost 9 percent after taking inflation into account, including cuts to: vocational and adult education, community development programs, environmental protection agency grants, low-income home energy assistance, disease control, substance abuse, OSHA and public safety.
At the same time, the President's budget proposes a 3 percent or $19 billion increase in Pentagon spending, not including funding for the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.
NPP has produced a breakdown of the budget's impact on each state for: the total of all discretionary federal grants to state and local governments; Low-Income Home and Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP); community and economic development funds, the No Child Left Behind Act; and the Clean Water State Revolving Fund. These state numbers, along with other budget information, can be found at: www.nationalpriorities.org/budget.
By the end of this week, NPP will also produce its 2-page publication for each state, including the state impact numbers alongside a broad analysis of the President's budget proposal. We will let you know when it is available on our website.
Posted by lois at 06:24 PM | Comments (0)
NY Times: Why Felons Deserve the Right to Vote
February 7, 2005
EDITORIAL
Why Felons Deserve the Right to Vote
n a watershed moment for the debate over whether convicted felons should be allowed to vote, the American Correctional Association has issued a welcome statement calling on states to end the practice of withholding voting rights from parolees and people who have completed their prison terms. Noting that society expects people to become responsible members of society once they are released from prison, the organization, which represents corrections officials, also called on states to cut through the confusing thicket of disenfranchisement laws by explaining clearly to inmates how they get their rights back after completing their sentences.
Some five million Americans are barred from the polls by a bewildering patchwork of state laws that strip convicted felons of the right to vote, often temporarily, but sometimes for life. These laws serve no correctional purpose - and may actually contribute to recidivism by keeping ex-offenders and their families disengaged from the civic mainstream. This notion is clearly supported by data showing that former offenders who vote are less likely to return to jail. This lesson has long since been absorbed by democracies abroad, some valuing the franchise so much that they take ballot boxes right to the prisons.
Several states are now reconsidering laws barring convicted felons from voting. In Maryland, for instance, the legislature is considering a bill that would eliminate a lifetime ban that remains in place for some offenders. The Maryland bill should pass. And other states should follow suit.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Posted by lois at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)
Oakland, CA: Can a Curfew Curtail Crime?
Sunday, February 6, 2005
OAKLAND MAYOR Jerry Brown saw a pattern in the city's grim homicide statistics and decided to do something about it.
About half of the victims were on probation or parole. Most of them were shot at night, typically away from home. Those who survived were likely to retaliate in short order.
"If we could find a way to keep them home at night," he observed, "they wouldn't be getting shot."
Thus Brown's controversial recommendation to add a new condition of probation for many felons in Alameda County: a curfew between 10 p.m. and 6 a. m.
Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff embraced the idea after he and his staff assessed its constitutionality. Orloff concluded that a curfew would pass legal muster if there was "a nexus" between the time of the crime of which a felon was convicted and the time of day. For example, Orloff explained, "If someone is selling drugs at high noon, there isn't that nexus between the condition and the crime."
The district attorney began requesting the curfew as a condition of probation about two months ago. So far, about 50 probationers have agreed to abide by the curfew, according to Orloff.
It's much too early to tell whether the policy is achieving its crime- reduction goal. The Oakland Police Department has yet to make an arrest on a curfew condition, Orloff said.
Still, the policy has generated widespread interest -- including protests from some civil libertarians and penal-reform advocates -- since Brown highlighted the policy in his Jan. 18 State of the City address. Brown has suggested that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger consider the curfew-condition idea for parolees leaving the state prison system.
Much of the criticism has been wildly overwrought or based on misperceptions about the policy.
The Oakland-based prison-reform group Critical Resistance said the curfew was "reminiscent of Black Codes and South African pass laws, which prevented people of color from moving freely in their communities."
Orloff, however, argued that a more apt comparison to the curfew would be the "stay away" orders that have long been a staple of our criminal-justice system. For example, drug dealers are routinely banned from areas where they once plied their trade. Convicted child molesters are often prohibited from being in the presence of children unless accompanied by another adult.
The restrictiveness of the curfew condition does raise concerns about how it would be enforced. Critical Resistance is worried about racial bias in its enforcement and whether it would result in more people being sent to prison on minor violations at a time when California should be looking for ways to reduce its corrections budget.
"Where are they going to be stopping people to see if they're on probation and out past 10?" asked Rose Braz of Critical Resistance. "It's not going to be in Rockridge."
The enforcement of these new rules must be monitored. Orloff insisted that a curfew violation would not result in imprisonment. The curfew condition does allow for people who work at night, or need to leave the house in an emergency.
If the curfew proves successful and is extended to parolees, said Brown, it could actually give the state the confidence to release more people from prison.
"You could let them out early -- and make them stay home at night," said Brown.
The curfew condition is an experiment worth trying -- and worth watching closely.
Page E - 4
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/02/06/EDGSMAPBHA1.DTL
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback | FAQ
Posted by lois at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)
Bush Sees More than $400 million for Crime-related Programs
By Jay Newton-Small
President George W. Bush will ask Congress for more than $400 million for new and expanded crime programs he proposed last night in his state of the union address, three administration officials said.
A new $150 million program to keep young men out of gangs would be headed by First Lady Laura Bush, the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters on a conference call. Of the 75,000 estimated gang members in the U.S., half are Hispanic and a third black, an official said.
"We need to focus on giving young people, especially young men in our cities, better options than apathy, or gangs, or jail," Bush told Congress last night.
"It's a step in the right direction, but $150 million for a national program, it's not a huge amount," Bobby Scott, the top Democrat on the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. "We have the largest incarceration rate of any nation on Earth and if you can reduce crime just a little bit you save more than you spend."
Bush also wants to spend $50 million over the next three years to train lawyers and judges who handle death-penalty cases in all 50 states, one of the administration officials said in the phone call, set up to flesh out details after Bush's speech. The initiative aims to provide the best possible trial and representation, the officials said. Problems in the system don't warrant a suspension of executions, they said.
DNA Backlog
Bush also will seek in the budget he sends Congress Feb. 7 to expand to $236 million funding toward the use of DNA evidence to prevent wrongful convictions. The money is part of a five- year, $1 billion initiative to expand DNA testing and would help in the gathering and maintenance of samples, the officials said.
"There is a serious backlog" of DNA gathered at crime scenes, said Scott. "You've got criminals just floating around that would be behind bars if they just had the funds to analyze the evidence."
"They're just making minor reforms around the edges," said Jason Ziedenberg, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based group that seeks to cut incarceration rates. "These three initiatives aren't really going to change the reality, that the number of people in prison are tearing apart communities."
As governor of Texas, Bush presided over 152 executions, more than any other governor in recent history, according to the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a Washington-based advocacy group. The violent crime rate in the U.S. has dropped 2 percent in 2004 and has dropped every year since Bush took office, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
February 4, 2005
Bloomberg News February 3, 2005 Thursday
Copyright 2005 Bloomberg L.P.
Bloomberg News
Posted by lois at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)
Asylum Seekers Treated Like " Criminals" Panel Says
Asylum Seekers Treated Poorly, U.S. Panel Says
By NINA BERNSTEIN and MARC SANTORA
NY Times February 8, 2005
Thousands of people who come to the United States saying they are seeking refuge from persecution are treated like criminals while their claims are evaluated - strip-searched, shackled and often thrown into solitary confinement in local jails and federal detention centers - a bipartisan federal commission found in a report to be released today.
The report, by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, an agency created by Congress in 1998, describes an ad hoc system run by the Department of Homeland Security that has extreme disparities in who is released or granted asylum, depending on whether someone seeks refuge in Texas or New York, comes from Iraq or Haiti, or is represented by a lawyer.
The New York metropolitan region ranks among the harshest in terms of the conditions of detention centers, with constant surveillance, stark quarters and degrading treatment. Those awaiting a court decision on asylum are also less likely to be freed. For example, 3.8 percent of asylum seekers were freed from the detention center in Elizabeth, N.J., compared with 94 percent in San Antonio. There were 8.4 percent released from the detention center in Queens, while in Chicago 81 percent were let go.
One of the experts who examined the centers for the commission, Craig Haney, a psychologist who briefed the Senate Judiciary Committee on the subject yesterday, said he was shocked by what he found.
"I was taken aback by the severity of conditions, the severity of deprivations and, frankly, the expense," he said in an interview. He said that one of 19 centers examined handled asylum seekers differently from criminals - in Broward County, Fla., where many seeking refuge are from Cuba and where former Cuban refugees form a potent political force. At $83 a day, the Florida center costs less than half the $200 per detainee of the Queens detention center, though both are run by the same company.
The report said that women and children seeking asylum, "whose trauma histories and emotional needs may be more severe and require more specialized training," were at greater risk of harm.
Among other recommendations, the commission urged that a high-level protector of refugees be appointed to monitor the system and correct inequities.
Manny Van Pelt, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency within Homeland Security that oversees the detention of asylum seekers, defended the system.
"We have a robust inspections program that conducts audits of our detention facilities nationwide, and our detention facilities are accredited and subjected to regular inspection by the U.N. High Commission for Refugees," he said in an interview. "They are clean and they are safe environments. Even better, the detention system protects the public."
The commission had been asked by Congress to examine the effectiveness of the nation's asylum regulations, created in part as a response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, in an effort to balance the country's desire to shelter those suffering from persecution abroad with its need to keep out criminals and terrorists.
The system, known as expedited removal, requires those seeking asylum at airports and borders to be sent back immediately unless they are found to have a "credible fear" of persecution when questioned by immigration officers. Those who pass the test - a vast majority - are then detained until an immigration judge decides the validity of their claim. Unless they are released pending a decision, the average detainee is held for 64 days and a third stay more than 90 days - some even years, the report found.
The number of asylum seekers, and the rate at which they are freed, have both dropped sharply since the terrorist attacks of 2001, the study showed. But rates of asylum also differed sharply by national groups between 2000 and 2004, with more than 80 percent of Cubans given a permanent right to stay, along with more than 60 percent of Iraqis. By contrast, just more than 10 percent of those from Haiti and fewer than 5 percent of those from El Salvador were granted asylum. Detainees represented by lawyers were up to 30 times more likely to gain asylum, but in some places fewer than half the detainees had lawyers.
With the exception of the operation at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, the report found that asylum seekers were not pressed to withdraw their asylum claims before the interview, nor were claims summarily denied. But it found that judges often wrongly used airport statements to deny asylum later.
Before the change in the law, only asylum seekers with criminal records were detained. Now, nearly all are locked up with ordinary criminals. In 2003, 5,585 men and 1,015 women seeking asylum were jailed. To cut down on that number, the commission recommended that the airport interviewers, and not just immigration judges, be given the authority to grant asylum on the spot when warranted.
Severe psychological damage is among the effects of throwing people seeking refuge together with criminals in "stark conditions," the report said, describing 24-hour lights, chained walks to go eat, no privacy even to use the toilet and little chance to exercise outdoors. Detainees are allowed to work but paid $1 a day.
Five of the 19 detention centers examined had mental health staff, and none had guards trained to work with victims of torture or repression. In most places the treatment for those considered suicidal was solitary confinement. A footnote pointed out that isolation was "likely to exacerbate depression," not prevent suicide.
"The whole detention system is there to break you down further," one former detainee told interviewers in the report. "You are not even allowed to cry. If you do, they take you to isolation."
Cut off from the outside world and not allowed incoming calls, even from a lawyer, the detainees are at high risk for depression, the commission said, and some even said they gave up their quest for asylum because of the unbearable conditions.
Since the 1996 change in immigration law, critics have complained that the system is subjecting those fleeing torture and repression to harsh conditions in detention that can drag on for years. But this is the first bipartisan examination based on an inside view.
One of the Republican commission members, Michael K. Young, the president of the University of Utah and an adviser to President George H. W. Bush, said great pains were taken to make the two-year effort politically balanced. "That is one of the things that gives this report real strength," he said.
Preeta D. Bansal, a Democrat who chaired the commission, said more research is needed, especially on the reasons for the sharp drop in asylum seekers. "We have been told that in foreign countries the Department of Homeland Security is being employed to prevent people from even getting on board airplanes," said Ms. Bansal, a former solicitor general of New York State. "We think further follow-up needs to be done."
The report comes the same week that asylum legislation is to be introduced in the House by Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican and chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Among other provisions, the bill, known as the Real ID Act, would make it harder for refugees to get asylum.
Margot Williams contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/nyregion/08asylum.html?th
Posted by lois at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)
February 06, 2005
"Cashing in on Cons: Undercover at the ACA 2005 Winter Conference
In These Times February 28, 2005
SILJA J.A. TALVI
IN 1971, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST Jessica Mitford attended the 101st Congress of the American Correctional Association (ACA) in Miami Beach. The ACA was founded in 1870 as the National Prison Association by reform-minded wardens who saw promise in the rehabilitation, religious redemption and humane treatment of prisoners. By 1971 they had developed a substantial membership, attracting 2,000 attendees to that year's congress.
(Another article on ACA follows this one)
In her seminal 1973 book, Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business, Mitford reported that the organization had shifted its focus from reforming and rehabilitating prisoners to reaping profit from incarceration. Exhibitors, she wrote, sold everything from tear gas grenades to stun gun prototypes. And with prisons facing costly lawsuits instigated by prisoners, litigation, Mitford wrote, was "very much on everybody's mind."
Thirty years later, how much has changed?
The 2005 winter conference in Phoenix -- attended by an estimted 4,000 -- found the ACA still touting its principles: "Humanity, Justice, Protection, Opportunity, Knowledge, Competence and Accountability." The organization stresses that it brings together individuals and groups "that share a common goal of improving the justice system." But with the prison industry now bringing in annual revenue of $ 50 billion, the ACA seems most intent on "improving" profits.
Today's ACA is a sleeker version of the organization Mitford examined, complete with online certification courses for correctional employees (starting at $ 29.95) and an expensive prison accreditation process that claims to instill transparency and accountability. Members are enticed to earn accreditation in order to receive up to a 10 percent discount on prison liability insurance (see "A Dubious Distinction").
Keeping litigation costs down is only one way prison corporations profit from incarceration. In addition, for-profit prisons also increase revenues by contracting with other corporations to provide substandard or overpriced services to prisoners. In some states, companies like Microsoft pay prisons to employ prisoners at wages far below market rates.
Taking advantage of the unprecedented prison boom of the late '80s and '90s, prison administrators, politicians, lobbying firms and corporate boards created a prison-industrial complex in which everyone benefits except the prisoners.
In 1980, federal and state prisons incarcerated 316,000 people. In 1990, that number had grown to 740,000, not including jail populations. By 2000, the number of prisoners had surpassed 1.3 million. Prison construction accompanied this growth: More than 1,000 prisons are now in operation, and each new prison comes with a bevy of contracts for construction and services.
The ACA conference is where many of these transactions are cemented.
Noting that the prison population may have reached its apogee, ACA President Gwendolyn C. Chunn told members at the conference, "We'll have a hard time holding on to what we have now." But attendees seemed more than willing to try; everyone at the conference seemed to be riding high on the promise of growth, expansion and profits.
Just business
This conference's theme was "Corrections Contributions to a Safer World," and the conference program didn't try to hide the gathering's militaristic bent. The cover of the 201-page ACA booklet featured a soldier with an enormous phallic tank gun, superimposed over the blue planet earth. And ACA's three keynote speakers were prominent conservatives or military
officers: retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, Michael Durant, the pilot of Black Hawk Down fame, and disgraced Homeland Security nominee Bernard Kerik.
The conference was financially supported by private prison giants such as the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the GEO Group (formerly known as Wackenhut), Correctional Services Corporation (CSC) and Correctional Medical Services (see "Detention Blues," July 5, 2004 for background on CSC). The titles of the dozens of overlapping workshops indicated what the ACA defined as the latest trends in corrections: "Faith-Based Juvenile Programming," "Anti-Terrorism in Correctional Facilities," and "Can't Simply Paint it Pink and Call it a Girl's Program."
One workshop -- "Intensive Medical Management: How to Handle Prisoners Who Self-Mutilate, Slime, Starve, Spit and Scratch" -- featured footage of a non-violent paranoid schizophrenic in Utah being forcibly extracted from his cell and then tied down to a restraint chair. After being strapped down naked for 16 hours, the delusional prisoner died. The session was facilitated by Todd Wilcox, the medical director of the Salt Lake County Metro Jail, who used the imagery as an example of how to avoid costly litigation. "Don't get personal with this," Wilcox said. "It's just business." He reminded the audience how important it is to sever the "emotional leash" that guards and nurses can form with inmates. He also referred to some mentally ill patients with "Axis II disorders" as "the people we affectionately call 'the assholes.'"
Pain for a price
The real draw of the ACA conference was the exhibitors, who had two full days to showcase their wares. The exhibition hall corridors had been given names like "Corrections Corporation of America Court," "Verizon Expressway," "Western Union Avenue," and "The GEO Court Lounge," where one could sip Starbucks and eat free glazed doughnuts.
Here, the discussions were all about increasing profit margins, lessening risks and liabilities, winning court cases, and new, improved techniques and technologies for managing the most troublesome inmates. In the glaringly bright exhibit hall, attendees buzzed around booths, snapping up freebies and admiring the latest in prison technology.
Exhibitors hawked restraint chairs, tracking systems, drug-detection tools, suicide-prevention smocks and prison facility insurance. Dozens of companies competed to sell private health care systems, pharmacy plans, commissary services and surveillance systems. Of particular interest were behavior modification programs, juvenile boot camps, and Internet and phone services. Interest in the latter brought in the "big boys" of telecommunications: Sprint, AT&T, NEC, MCI Communications, Verizon, Global Tel*Link and Qwest. And why not? Prison phone contracts that overcharge prisoners and their families generate an estimated $ 1 billion a year.
The range of products went on from one corridor to the next: storage systems, money wiring, surveillance, security transport, fencing and prison medical packages. (Industry giant Prison Health Services brought in rescued owls and hawks to draw crowds. What was the connection to prison health? "Oh, nothing!") Vendors who couldn't afford dog-and-pony shows handed out free bags, pens, toothpicks, mugs, tape measures and sugarcoated churros. The exhibitors who didn't need giveaways to draw crowds included weapons manufacturers Smith & Wesson, Glock and Taser International.
Two smiling exhibitors, standing behind the Taser booth, allowed the curious to handle the latest in 50,000-volt stun gun technology. On the Taser table a video looped on a monitor. It depicted a naked African-American man being chased down by police officers. Shot once he's shown falling hard to the ground. Tasered again, his body shudders, before collapsing altogether. The contextless footage was meant to illustrate the efficacy of the stun gun, used by more than 6,000 police departments, that had become the leader in the "non-lethal weapons" industry -- that is, before a spate of negative press, including reports of an SEC investigation, had put the company's stock price into a tailspin.
In November 2004, Amnesty International issued a report that blamed at least 74 deaths since 2001 on Tasers and called for a suspension of their use until further studies could prove just how "non-lethal" these weapons were. Headline business news emerged during the ACA conference: Taser executives were reported to have sold $ 91.5 million of their own stock, raising suspicions that they sought to maximize their own profits before their product lost ground. The company subsequently announced that sales were projected to slow in the months to come. The stock plunged 30 percent. As if all that weren't bad enough, Taser International President Tom Smith said in an interview that four active-duty police officers had been offered stock options for law enforcement training programs they supervised, which in turn had "led directly to the sale of Tasers to a number of police departments."
It's a good thing that former Taser spokesman Bernard Kerik cashed in when he did. The former New York City police commissioner made more than $ 6.2 million in pretax profits from the sale of Taser stock in the month leading up to his abortive Homeland Security nomination.
The venal system
Scores of individuals from prison acquisition and purchasing departments, consulting agencies, and the ranks of high-level prison administrators had come to the conference for networking, recruiting and, above all, business. Private contractors, like food service businesses Aramark and Canteen, discreetly targeted these attendees for their offsite wine-and-dine dinners, issuing covert invitations to people whose badges indicated their importance in the field.
Following a day of tours at Arizona jails and prisons, about 60 conference-goers headed to the Canteen fete at an upscale Italian restaurant in the nearby Arizona Center. Cocktails and bottles upon bottles of wine were poured out prior to a multicourse meal. Wardens and top-ranking corrections administrators from Arizona, New Mexico and Maryland sat in the outdoor patio under heat lamps. Salesmen from Canteen were pressing flesh and passing out business cards. There were smiles all around.
Like so many other private companies working in prisons, Aramark and Canteen have had their share of problems. Aramark was singled out by "Stop the ACA" union-organized protests outside of the conference. On the third day of the conference, protesters snuck in and placed informational materials in the toilet seat cover holders of convention center bathrooms.
On the fourth day of the conference, Aramark sought to spruce up its image with a faux-New Orleans-style gentleman's "entertainer," complete with pink top, feather cap and black fishnets. The heavily made-up young woman knelt before prison administrators, giving them free shoeshines.
Aramark's low bids have succeeded in getting contracts in many jails and prisons. The company boasts that it provides more than a million meals a day to prisoners nationwide. Aramark materials also emphasize the company's adherence to ACA standards, but that hasn't stopped the allegations from piling up. In Dauphin County, Pa., for instance, a grand jury is investigating charges of overbilling and poor food quality. In July 2004, New Mexico inmates at Los Lunas prison, fed up with Aramark's low food quality and "inedible" meat-type products, organized a hunger strike. Similar problems have been reported in at least a dozen states.
Privatization, politicians and payola
The glossy GEO world magazine, distributed at the ACA conference, trumpeted the success of the largest "Private-Public Partnership in the World," a sprawling detention center complex in Pecos, Texas. Known as the Reeves County Detention Facility (RCDC), the complex consists of prisons for both Bureau of Prisons and Arizona state inmates. According to GEO, "the joint venture . . . between GEO Group and Reeves County has been a rewarding challenge."
Unmentioned was the fact that a Reeves County judge, Jimmy Galindo, is facing a lawsuit over his role in granting the private operation and expansive construction of RCDC. According to the local Odessa American newspaper, building RCDC has led to the "near financial ruin of the county." RCDC is currently the subject of an FBI and Texas Ranger investigation into tampering with government documents. (In addition, two corrections officers resigned in early January 2005 over sexual molestation charges.)
The RCDC is a private-public partnership in more ways than one. Randy DeLay, the brother of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), lobbied the Bureau of Prisons to send its prisoners to RCDC, at the behest of county officials.
Randy DeLay isn't the only member of his family with an interest in corrections. In December, Rep. DeLay accepted a $ 100,000 check from the CCA for the DeLay Foundation for Kids.
The CCA has become a leader in securing private prison contracts. In FY 2003, the CCA generated more than $ 268.9 million in revenue. Greasing the palms of legislators nationwide hasn't hurt: In 2004, the CCA's political action committee gave $ 59,000 to candidates for federal office -- 92 percent to Republicans.
This is part and parcel of an industry in the business of locking up human beings. As the industry has grown, the ACA has moved away from the ideals of rehabilitation and redemption of the human spirit. Today, human beings behind bars are little more than commodities to be traded on the open market.
Bill Deener, a financial writer for the Dallas Morning News, writing about recent gains in the private prison market, put it this way: "Crime may not pay, but prisons sure do."
In 1963, philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about the "banality of evil." Contained within the packed exhibition hall of the ACA conference was evidence of what Arendt cautioned against: the normalization of dehumanization. Today, the banality of evil has found a home in the mundane marketplace that is the prison industry.
Three days before the ACA conference, MSN Money's Michael Brush issued a glowing report on the investment potential for the CCA and GEO. The children of the baby boomers, he explained, are about to enter the 18-24-year-old age group -- "the years when people commit the most crimes." He suggested now is the right time to buy into the trend: "[T]he nation's private prison companies look like solid investments for the next several years."
In These Times February 28, 2005
A Dubious Distinction
Silja J.A. Talvi
"ACCREDITATION IS AWARDED to the 'best of the best' in the corrections field,'" as the ACA explains on its Web site (www.aca.org
Yet the fact remains that the ACA is still a private, non-governmental organization with no authority to change prison conditions or to enforce standards. The ACA's accreditation process is kept secret from the public; all that outsiders know for sure is which facilities have been accredited. Today, only 10 percent of government-managed facilities are ACA-accredited, compared with 44 percent of privately managed prisons. Texas leads the pack in prison privatization, followed closely by Florida, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Colorado.
The 22-year-old Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is both the most successful and the most ACA-accredited prison corporation, managing more than 50 percent of all private prison beds at 63 facilities around the country. Representing the sixth largest prison system in the United States
-- and racked by controversy, serious prison riots and complaints about poorly trained, low-paid corrections workers -- CCA boasts that 75 percent of its facilities have the ACA stamp of approval.
How meaningful is ACA accreditation?
In July 2004, a severe prison riot broke out at the ACA-accredited Crowley County Correctional Facility, a CCA prison near Pueblo, Colo. For nearly six hours, several hundred Colorado and out-of-state prisoners wreaked havoc on the prison, destroying cells, furniture, plumbing and equipment. Prison administrators had continually ignored complaints about food quality, conditions of confinement and the physical abuse of prisoners. At the time of the riot, only 33 guards were watching over 1,122 prisoners. Several of those guards fled the facility in panic. An extensively detailed 174-page "After Action" report, prepared by the Colorado Department of Corrections, noted CCA's deficiencies and serious errors in running the prison. But CCA retained both its contract to run the prison and its accreditation.
In September 2004, prisoners rioted at Kentucky's Lee Adjustment Center, another CCA-run, ACA-accredited prison. Correctional officers working there make less than $ 8.00 an hour, and sometimes work 12-hour shifts.
The government-run Mississippi State Penitentiary, which was taken to court in July 2002 over its filthy, vermin- and mosquito-infested death row cells, is also accredited by the ACA (see "Cruel as Usual," January 19, 2004). So is the Santa Fe County Detention Center, run by the Management and Training Corporation, which faces a federal lawsuit for violations of civil and constitutional rights, including its former practice of mandatory strip searches of every inmate.
BY SILJA J.A. TALVI an award-winning journalist, is currently writing a book about women in prison. In reporting this story, Talvi did not disclose her identity as a journalist. All the attributed quotes in this article come from individuals speaking in an official capacity at ACA events.
Posted by lois at 06:11 PM | Comments (0)
February 03, 2005
CA: DOC considers "early parole" for brain dead man
Editorial: Beyond bizarre
Thursday, February 3, 2005, Sacramento Bee
What does it take to get declared dead in California, anyway? The question isn't as dumb as it may seem. Consider:
A person who is declared brain dead is legally and physiologically dead. "Brain dead" is dead.
By that standard, a Wasco State Prison inmate surely qualifies as being dead. So why is he being treated as alive?
The prisoner, Daniel Provencio, has been at Mercy Hospital in Bakersfield since he was shot in the head with a "foam" bullet by a prison guard Jan. 16. Members of Provencio's family told the Bakersfield Californian that doctors declared him clinically dead the morning of Jan. 20 after tests found no brain activity.
Under California law, the hospital must do two examinations by two different doctors to determine death. If the patient meets all criteria for death on both examinations, this is noted in the medical record at the time of the second exam and is recorded as the time of death. The coroner's office typically is called as soon as death is declared.
Yet Provencio's mother said Wasco Warden P.L. Vazquez expects Provencio to "serve out his sentence" from a hospital bed. The family has asked obvious questions: "If he's dead, why are they keeping him? How does a dead man do time?"
Here's how. Provencio is on a mechanical ventilator and a feeding tube, even though he's dead. And he's shackled to the bed by both ankles, even though he's dead. He's being guarded by prison guards 'round-the-clock at a cost of $1,056-a-day, even though he's dead.
No, we are not making this up. But the absurdities don't end there.
The Department of Corrections apparently now is considering a "compromise" that might allow the dead man to be released on "early parole."
Obviously, this preposterous situation can't go on. The hospital needs to step forward and make a definitive declaration: Is Provencio dead? If yes, what was his time of death, and why hasn't he been released for burial?
Time of death is recorded on a patient's chart as the time he met the criteria of brain death. If he's not dead, who told the family that Provencio is "brain dead," which is dead-dead? Either the family is being denied the right to bury their relative or they have been subjected to a huge hoax.
The absurdities aren't confined to the handling of Provencio's current condition. Consider the chain of events that led to the present situation.
At Wasco State Prison on Jan. 16, two inmates were fighting; Provencio apparently tried to prevent prison guards from intervening.
KGET-TV 17 News reported that the incident was an "alcohol-fueled brawl between inmates." Officers told the station that inmates brew fruit and other food ingredients. A guard shot Provencio in the head, though "foam" bullets are meant to be fired at a person's legs and arms.
Alcohol production and brawls. Shooting inmates in the head. Shackling and guarding a dead inmate. What is going on at this prison? The Department of Corrections needs to get control of this out-of-control institution. And it needs to end the macabre saga of the (apparently) late Daniel Provencio.
Posted by lois at 09:46 PM | Comments (0)
TX:: Legislative budget writers urge probation programs, not more prisons State's prison population, costs growing
By Mike Ward, AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, February 03, 2005
..."We're going to have to increase the emphasis on probation. There's no question about it," said Appropriations Committee Chairman Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie. "We simply can't afford to build a bunch of new prisons, much less pay to operate them."
Facing a looming shortage of prison beds and a huge price tag to build more prisons, legislative budget writers today advocated new funding for probation and rehabilitation programs as a way to diffuse what could soon become an even bigger budget-breaking crisis.
Bottom line: Local probation programs will have to be bolstered so that more judges can sentence nonviolent offenders there.
In testimony this morning, committee members were told by state budget analysts and prison officials that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice could be out of beds to house new convicts as early as March. It will then have to lease jail beds from counties, at an estimated cost of more than $12 million for the rest of the budget year, which ends Aug. 31.
During the next two years, prison officials say they will need an additional $51 million to lease 3,500 beds. And in five years, official projections show, the system will be 15,000 beds short.
While prisons will need tens of millions more to maintain the current system, Pitt said other agencies are also seeking increases. In all, he said today he expects there will be $10 billion worth of needs on the table — including school finance reform — beyond what the state needs to maintain current services..
"Obviously, that's a lot more than we have available — so you can see that we're going to have to look at alternatives," Pitt said. "Increasing probation programs is one of the places I think we'll start."
Committee members questioned why so many offenders, who are filling up the prison beds — 15,000 during the last year alone — are there for technical violations of their probation, many for minor infractions such as not paying their probation fees on time. In all, officials said 70,000 convicts in prison today are there because their parole or probation was revoked.
Texas prisons hold a little more than 150,000 people.
State Rep. Pat Haggerty, R-El Paso, a former chairman of the House Corrections Committee that oversees the prison system, said the probation rate has declined while the prison rate is up. That should be no surprise, he said.
Two years ago, officials said, the state cut funding for some probation programs. Others were never fully funded.
"We'd better get it now or we're going to have to build new prisons," Haggerty said.
Like others, state Reps. Al Edwards, D-Houston, and Peggy Hamric, R-Houston, recalled the building boom that Texas undertook just a decade ago to solve prison crowding: More than $1 billion was spent to triple the size of the prison system, in what was touted as the largest public works program in U.S. history.
"This sounds like the same old soup, just warmed over," Edwards said. "We're going to have to make changes so we don't continue doing the same thing over and over."
And if the bed space costs seem high, the related costs are up, as well. Prison officials say they need an additional $75 million to cover skyrocketing medical costs, plus other multimillion-dollar increases to properly supervise, feed and care for the growing numbers of convicts. Five additional prisons will be needed in the next five years just to keep up with the growth, they said, unless new programs are launched to divert nonviolent and minor offenders from prison.
"It concerns me that we thought we were going to have capacity for the future — and we don't," Hamric said. "It's distressing."
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/02/4prisons.
html
Posted by lois at 09:36 PM | Comments (0)
CA: Prison without hope of parole
..."More than 95% of those who apply are rejected by the parole board, and of the few who actually receive a recommendation of parole, a little more than a third are released by the governor. "
COMMENTARY
A Prison Without Hope Is a Dangerous Place
By David Feige
February 1, 2005
Thousands of California inmates have a little less to live for this week thanks to a California Supreme Court decision that helps cement the state's shift in penal philosophy from rehabilitation to rank retribution.
The court's decision in the case of John Dannenberg, handed down last week, allows the state parole board to deny parole to inmates solely on the nature of their original offense. Even if an inmate has an unblemished record in prison, and even if an inmate is deemed not to be dangerous by mental health and prison officials, the court ruled, the parole board may determine that the original crime was so heinous that the prisoner should be denied release.
Obviously, that's demoralizing for inmates. But it also reflects a depressing and unhealthy strain of penal philosophy — one that rejects the idea that criminals can be rehabilitated and endorses the view that a single evil act can render someone utterly irredeemable.
Traditionally, criminal sentences have been designed to address the severity of the crime. (And in some cases, crimes are held to be so severe that the criminal is deemed ineligible for parole.) Back-end release mechanisms, on the other hand, have sought to gauge the success of the sentence or punishment. Solely considering the severity of the crime in the parole decision turns this notion on its head.
By allowing parole boards to ignore an offender's conduct after the crime, the court has endorsed an approach in which a single inalterable moment can erase any subsequent conduct. And although that inflexible, retributive system might appeal to some, allowing permanent incarceration without regard to rehabilitation is bad social policy.
It is already terribly hard to get out of prison. Despite spotless prison records, or a decade or more of strong evidence of rehabilitation, parole is elusive for thousands of inmates serving parole-eligible life sentences.
More than 95% of those who apply are rejected by the parole board, and of the few who actually receive a recommendation of parole, a little more than a third are released by the governor.
Yet even this faint hope of release and redemption is enough to encourage many inmates to spend years or decades becoming model prisoners — which is undeniably good for the public, good for the prison system and good for the offender. That seems to be the case with 64-year-old John Dannenberg, who murdered his wife in 1985 and who has since served 18 years in San Quentin. Dannenberg has a spotless record in prison and favorable psychological evaluations. His two children, both adults, support his release. But what's the point of spending a decade or two compiling a perfect prison record if that record might not even be considered?
Even those who favor a retributive penal system should oppose this decision. Creating reasonable incentives is consonant with American ideals. In almost every arena of society, we celebrate reward systems as integral to a "work hard and earn your reward" culture.
The Dannenberg decision, though, fundamentally rejects this vision, and in so doing flies in the face of our society's most fundamental ideas about redemption.
Imagine the hue and cry from the business world if the Dannenberg case rationale were applied to corporate compensation: No matter how much a company grew and prospered under his leadership, a CEO could be denied a bonus because he failed finance in college.
Inmates make easy targets, and curtailing parole, especially for those serving indeterminate life-maximum terms, is politically easy. Yet the cost to prison stability and to taxpayers is not insignificant.
This year, California will spend more than $5 billion to maintain its prison system, with many of the state's 31,000 prison guards earning more than public school teachers. The Dannenberg decision relegates an entire class of inmates to the vagaries of the political realm, where their fortunes are dictated by attitudes toward crime rather than rehabilitation, proportionality, justice or common sense.
The decision is a tragedy for taxpayers, who are footing the bill for the continued incarceration of those long since rehabilitated, for the wardens charged with guarding those who may now be without hope of freedom and for the inmates themselves, to whom the state has said, in essence, "After what you've done, don't bother to be good."
As satisfying as it may be to create an extraordinarily punitive prison system, leaving thousands of inmates with nothing to hope for is not only brutal, it's scary because, as any warden will tell you, a prison without hope is a dangerous place indeed.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-feige1feb01,0,323411.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
David Feige is a public defender. "Indefensible," his book about the criminal justice system, will be published by Little, Brown later this year.
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
Posted by lois at 09:31 PM | Comments (0)
CO: Juvenile Lifers Decried: Human Rights Watch calls sentences cruel & unfair
By Peggy Lowe, Rocky Mountain News
February 3, 2005
Forty-six people sentenced as juveniles in Colorado will spend the rest of their lives in prison without the possibility of parole, a sentence that is cruel, unfair and unnecessary, a report says.
Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group, will release a highly critical study today called "Thrown Away: Children Sentenced to Life Without Parole in Colorado."
The study is being released on the same day a hearing is scheduled on a bill that would end the practice and eliminate a prosecutor's right to take a juvenile murder case directly to adult court.
House Bill 1109, by Rep. Lynn Hefley, R-Colorado Springs, will be heard by the House Judiciary Committee.
Colorado law requires judges to impose life without parole on children as young as 12 if they commit first-degree murder. International human rights law bars that practice, as well as the death penalty, and recognizes that the purpose of punishment is deterrence, retribution and rehabilitation, the report says.
"This issue of sentencing juveniles to life without parole is clearly prohibited by human rights law and it's astonishing the United States still practices this when 133 counties around the world don't, and in fact never have," said Alison Parker, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch.
The Colorado District Attorneys Council is opposing the bill because it would undo the major juvenile justice changes made after the so-called Summer of Violence in 1993, said Bob Grant, a former prosecutor and executive director of the council.
Before the creation of a youth offender system, prosecutors couldn't do a "direct file" of a juvenile case into an adult court, he said. Extensive transfer hearings generally resulted in the accused being placed in a juvenile system, which wasn't equipped to deal with a violent offender, Grant said.
"Those, I'm sorry, are not children," he said. "Those are murderers. Those are the worst of the worst."
The "direct file" issue is the reason Human Rights Watch chose Colorado for a case study, Parker said. Allowing prosecutors to do that removes a juvenile judge who would take into account a child's history and living circumstances, allowing more checks in the system, she said.
"If we're going to be just and we're going to apply the standards of civilized and humane society, then we have to treat defendants to take into account who they are," Parker said.
The bill is being promoted by a group called Pendulum, a Colorado-based organization that works on juvenile justice issues. Mary Ellen Johnson, a Pendulum member, said children are much different than adults mentally and emotionally.
Johnson has written a book, The Murder of Jacob, which tells the story of Jacob Ind, a Manitou Springs youth convicted of killing his mother and stepfather in 1992 when he was 17.
"We do think that children are different than adults and they deserve a second chance," she said. "They say they are the worst of the worst. They are not."
By the numbers
46 juvenile offenders are serving sentences of life without parole in Colorado.
• 1 of the 46 is a female.
• 57 percent committed their crimes at age 17.
• 22 percent were 16 when they committed their crimes.
• 17 percent were 15 when they committed their crimes.
• 4 percent (two of the juveniles) were 14 years old.
• 26 percent of those serving life sentences are black.
• 29 percent are white.
• Two-thirds of the convictions were for murder, and one-third were for felony murder, in which the juvenile did not personally kill anyone but played a role in a robbery or other dangerous felony in which an accomplice killed someone.
Source: "Thrown Away: Children Sentenced To Life Without Parole In Colorado," a report by Human Rights Watch
lowep@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5482
Copyright 2005, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.
URL: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/legislature/article/0,1299,DRMN_37_3518798,00.html
Posted by lois at 09:25 PM | Comments (0)
February 02, 2005
Violence & Change in Baltimore Neighborhoods
Urban Geography has published an article, abstract and link to download below.
Harries studies neighborhoods in Baltimore in which the population of males aged 18-40 or so dropped dramatically between 1990 and 2000. Most models of crime prevention argue that having fewer males of that age should reduce crime, but in these Baltimore neighborhoods, violent crime (homicides and aggravated assaults) increased at rates greater than in other Baltimore neighborhoods. His rather understated conclusion seems to fit nicely with the work of Rose & Clear -- the removal of too many people (to prison, to the military) from a neighborhood actually increases the likelihood of violent crime.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bell/urban/2004/00000025/00000001/art00002
Violence Change and Cohort Trajectories: Baltimore Neighborhoods, 1990-2000
Author: Harries K.
Source: Urban Geography, 1 January 2004, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 14-30(17)
Abstract:
: Whereas the relationship between poverty and violence is incontrovertible in the American city, demographic relationships at the neighborhood level are relatively poorly understood. Patterns of violence and population change are examined at the census tract level in Baltimore, Maryland across the decade from 1990 to 2000. Aggravated assault and homicide are combined and used as a composite indicator of serious violence. Population data are examined for selected tracts representative of anomalous outliers experiencing population decline but increased violence. The data are broken down into five-year cohorts represented graphically at their beginning
(1990) and end (2000) points. The analysis indicates that some neighborhoods have experienced collapse of youthful cohorts. Normally, a decline in youthful population would predict a reduction in crime, but this analysis suggests that at the neighborhood scale criminogenic processes may affect neighborhoods somewhat independently of their demographic attributes. Most notably, population decline at the neighborhood level may be accompanied by crime increase, contrary to macrolevel theoretical expectation.
Posted by lois at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)
February 01, 2005
Calculating Million Dollar Blocks
Criminal Justice and Health and Human Services: An Exploration of Overlapping Needs, Resources, and Interests in Brooklyn Neighborhoods
http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/410633_CriminalJustice.pdf
Posted by lois at 09:50 PM | Comments (0)
Fed Appeals Court Urged to consider dilution of minority voting due to incarceration
NEWS RELEASE FEBRUARY 2, 2005
FEDERAL APPEALS COURT URGED TO CONSIDER CENSUS-BASED DILUTION OF MINORITY VOTING STRENGTH WHEN WEIGHING LEGALITY OF PRISONER DISENFRANCHISEMENT SCHEME
"....New York State is majority White (62%), but its prison population is majority Black and Latino (82%), so disenfranchising prisoners and parolees results in a disproportionate bar to Black and Latino political participation. "
The National Voting Rights Institute and the Prison Policy Initiative have filed a brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit highlighting the New York State legislature's racially discriminatory redistricting practice of crediting rural white counties with additional population based on the presence of disenfranchised prisoners in upstate prisons. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is hearing the case of Muntaqim v. Coombe, a case brought by an African-American prisoner alleging that racial disparities in disenfranchisement of prisoners and parolees in New York violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The friend-of-the-court brief filed by the National Voting Rights Institute and the Prison Policy Initiative argues that the Court should consider the redistricting implications of disenfranchisement as part of the ³totality of circumstances² which must be examined under the Voting Rights Act.
New York State is majority White (62%), but its prison population is majority Black and Latino (82%), so disenfranchising prisoners and parolees results in a disproportionate bar to Black and Latino political participation. In their brief, the National Voting Rights Institute and the Prison Policy Initiative provide new information to the court showing how New York State's disenfranchisement practices combine with its redistricting practices to diminish the voting strength of persons of color and communities not under direct criminal justice control.
In drawing state legislative districts, New York uses Census Bureau data that counts the state's mostly urban and minority prisoners as residents of the mostly white and rural prison counties rather than as residents of the home communities where they resided prior to incarceration, where they are deemed legal residents for most other legal purposes. Several upstate legislative districts lack sufficient population to meet accepted one-person, one-vote standards without counting disenfranchised prisoners as part of their population base. At the same time, heavily minority districts in New York City would in all likelihood be entitled to additional representation if prisoners were counted as residents of their home communities for purposes of redistricting.
"Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act requires the Court to examine the 'totality of the circumstances' when judging the legality of prisoner disenfranchisement," said Brenda Wright, managing attorney of the non-profit National Voting Rights Institute. "New York's decision to credit disenfranchised prisoners to largely white counties, rather than their home communities, is a critical example of racial discrimination the court should consider."
The brief argues that New York¹s practice does have one historical parallel that the Court should be disinclined to follow. Says Prison Policy Initiative Assistant Director Peter Wagner: "The practice bears a striking resemblance to the original 'Three-Fifths' clause of the United States Constitution, which allowed the South to obtain enhanced representation in Congress by counting disenfranchised slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional apportionment."
In Muntaqim v. Coombe, the Second Circuit has taken the unusual step of granting in banc review by all active judges on the Court, after a three-judge panel initially ruled against the plaintiff and held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act does not permit a challenge to prisoner disenfranchisement. The amicus brief of NVRI and the Prison Policy Institute, filed on January 28, 2005, is available on NVRI¹s website at: http://www.nvri.org/about/new_york_state_policies.shtml
The National Voting Rights Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan legal center. Through litigation and public education, NVRI seeks to make real the promise of American democracy that meaningful political participation and power should be accessible to all regardless of economic or social status. The Prison Policy Initiative conducts research and advocacy on incarceration policy. Among its publications are a report, Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York (April 2002), which documents how the transfer of a large, non-voting population to upstate prisons, where it is counted as part of the population base for redistricting, artificially enhances the representation afforded to predominantly white, upstate legislative districts.
-30-
CONTACT:
Brenda Wright, National Voting Rights Institute (617) 624-3900, ext. 13 bw@nvri.org Peter Wagner, Prison Policy Initiative (413) 586-4985 pwagner@prisonpolicy.org
http://www.PrisonersoftheCensus.org
http://www.prisonpolicy.org
Prison Policy Initiative PO Box 127 Northampton, MA 01061
Posted by lois at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)
New Rules Keep People with Felony Convictions from working in trucking, airports...
Jobs decline for ex-cons since 9/11
New Rules keep felons from working in trucking, airport and other blue collar jobs
By Lance Gay, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE Inside Bay Area
WASHINGTON — Although President Bush has vowed to expand jobs for the 600,000 felons released from prison each year, anti-terrorism laws adopted in the wake of 9/11 are closing off several blue-collar occupations that ex-cons used to fill.
Federal regulations that went into effect in January are aimed at preventing ex-cons convicted of serious crimes from driving gasoline tankers or other trucks carrying hazardous materials.
Following Sept. 11, the government also imposed regulations at the nation's airports evicting convicted felons who were working at airport shoeshine stands or as baggage handlers. The airports cite federal rules prohibiting them from giving airport identification badges to felons.
Criminologists say the restrictions are misguided and will drive felons back into lives of crime.
Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington think tank that follows criminal-justice issues, said the laws are taking jobs away from people who served time for their mistakes and have since put their lives back together.
"You have lots of felons who were convicted 20 years ago and who haven't been involved in a crime since," he said.
Mauer said he agrees with laws that prohibit sex offenders from working in day-care centers. But he said many states have laws forbidding felons from working as barbers, and one state won't permit former felons to work as asbestos-removers.
Depending on state laws, a felony conviction can prevent a person from voting, getting professional licenses as Realtors or ophthalmologists, adopting a child, selling alcohol or being involved in racing cars or horses. Congress passed a law in 1998 to prevent ex-cons from getting Pell Grants, the largest federal loan program that students use to finance education.
Margaret Love, a Washington attorney who is writing a book on the "collateral sanctions" that come with sentences, said denying felons certificates to drive hazmat trucks or work in airports provides no additional protection against terrorism.
"We're giving more and more, and harsher and harsher, penalties, and then we're hitting these people with these additional disabilities. We've taken away the social net so these people can't get welfare benefits, and now this. We just hate these people. We just hate them," she said.
Love said she is hearing from state parole boards that the number of people seeking pardons for their crimes is increasing as former convicts seek to avoid being hit with continuing penalties for their convictions.
"I think this is a really serious problem," she said.
Bush says he is concerned about helping felons get productive jobs, and in his State of the Union address to Congress last year proposed a $300 million "prison re-entry initiative" that would ease the 600,000 people released from prison each year back into work. "America is the land of the second chance — and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life," Bush said.
Rep. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, last year introduced the "second chance bill" that would have carried out the program, but Congress did not act on it. A Portman aide said the congressman is reintroducing the measure in this Congress.
An estimated 14 million Americans have felony records. Justice Department statistics indicate that about half of the men released from prison are charged with another crime within three years of release, and about 41 percent go back behind bars.
The job opportunities for those who don't go back to crime are narrowing.
The Department of Homeland Security says conviction of major felonies such as murder and racketeering will mean that truck drivers won't get certifications, but convictions of some crimes like arson will be decided on a case-by-case basis.
"There's no question about it, we're becoming a more punitive society," said University of Baltimore criminologist Jeffrey Ross. He said employers are conducting criminal background checks for relatively menial blue-collar jobs and increasingly refusing to hire anyone whose background is suspect.
Obtaining clemency for past crimes is also becoming rarer. The American Bar Association says governors are increasingly reluctant to exercise their powers of pardon because of the possible toxic political consequences.
A survey by the American Bar Association found a marked dropoff in post-sentence presidential pardons, which are given to people who have been tried, convicted, served their full sentences and then led law-abiding lives for five years.
From Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency through Jimmy Carter's, an average of more than 200 people each year were granted some form of presidential clemency. But beginning with the tough-on-crime policies, President Ronald Reagan pardoned only about 200 in each of his four-year terms. President George H.W. Bush pardoned 77 during his four years in office, while Bill Clinton was the first president to wait until his second term in office before issuing 457 presidential pardons, most of which came in his last year and stirred threats of congressional investigations.
During his time in office, George W. Bush has issued 31 pardons.
Article Last Updated: 1/29/2005 06:44 AM
Posted by lois at 08:44 PM | Comments (0)